Privacy-Preserving Survey By Crowdsourcing With Smartphones

In this paper we propose a solution for privacy-preserving survey. We assume a crowdsourcing platform with a big number of registered smartphones. The platform works as a coordinator between data owners and service requestors (i.e., survey users). It shifts most workload to the smartphones of data owners, and thus is lightweighted and scalable. For privacy protection, we apply cryptography techniques to ensure that the service requestors will get aggregated survey results, but will not learn personal information of any individual data owner. At the same time, the crowdsourcing platform will learn neither the information of individuals nor the aggregated survey results. In addition, different from existing work, by which data owners pass their data to survey agency and lose control on their data, our solution stores data at their owners' smartphones and allow the owners to control how their data will be used.