Crowdsensing Multimedia Data: Security and Privacy Issues

Recent smartphones are equipped with various sensors, such as an accelerometer, GPS, and a gravity sensor, and have high-performance wireless communication capabilities. Through the ubiquitous presence of powerful mobile devices, crowdsensing lets ordinary people collectively gather and share real-time multimedia data. Multimedia crowdsensing has made large-scale participatory sensing viable in a speedy and cost-efficient manner, but it also introduces some security and privacy concerns. Personally identifiable information of participants can be exposed while sharing individually owned sensor data. This article identifies security and privacy issues in multimedia crowdsensing and describes existing solutions that are designed to protect both data producers and consumers in multimedia crowdsensing. This article is part of a special issue on cybersecurity.