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The purpose driven privacy preservation for accelerometer-based activity recognition

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Abstract

Accelerometer-based activity recognition (AAR) attracted a lot of attentions due to the wide spread of smartphones with energy-efficiency. However, since accelerometer data contains individual characteristics; AAR might raise privacy concerns. Although numerous privacy preservation approaches, such as ”privacy filtering, differential privacy, and inferential privacy”, have been proposed to conceal sensitive information, unfortunately they cannot address the privacy problem associated with AAR. In this paper, we report our efforts to control the use of the AAR while preserving the privacy. To achieve this task, our method leverages a connection to agglomerative information bottleneck, through which the amount of disclosed data can be compressed so that irrelevant private information can be reduced, and a connection to general privacy statistical inference framework, where both of the privacy leakage and utility accuracy are considered as mutual information. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed solution can greatly reduce privacy leakage while maintaining a relative good utility.

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Correspondence to Mingming Lu.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Deep Mining Big Social Data

Guest Editors: Xiaofeng Zhu, Gerard Sanroma, Jilian Zhang, and Brent C. Munsell

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Menasria, S., Wang, J. & Lu, M. The purpose driven privacy preservation for accelerometer-based activity recognition. World Wide Web 21, 1773–1785 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-018-0604-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-018-0604-z

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