Privacy-Preserving Data Collection with Self-Awareness Protection

Data privacy protection is an emerging issue in data collection due to increasing concerns related to security and privacy. In the current data collection approaches, data collector is a dominant player who enforces the secure protocol. In other words, privacy protection is only defined by the data collector without the participation of any respondents. Furthermore, the privacy protection becomes more crucial when the raw data analysis is performed by the data collector itself. In view of this, some of the respondents might refuse to contribute their personal data or submit inaccurate data. In this paper, we study a self-awareness protocol to raise the confidence of the respondents when submitting their personal data to the data collector. Our self-awareness protocol requires each respondent to help others in preserving his privacy. At the end of the protocol execution, respondents can verify the protection level (i.e., k-anonymity) they will receive from the data collector.