Replacement AutoEncoder: A Privacy-Preserving Algorithm for Sensory Data Analysis
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An increasing number of sensors on mobile, Internet of things (IoT), and wearable devices generate time-series measurements of physical activities. Though access to the sensory data is critical to the success of many beneficial applications such as health monitoring or activity recognition, a wide range of potentially sensitive information about the individuals can also be discovered through these datasets and this cannot easily be protected using traditional privacy approaches. In this paper, we propose an integrated sensing framework for managing access to personal time-series data in order to provide utility while protecting individuals' privacy. We introduce Replacement AutoEncoder, a novel feature-learning algorithm which learns how to transform discriminative features of multidimensional time-series that correspond to sensitive inferences, into some features that have been more observed in non-sensitive inferences, to protect users' privacy. The main advantage of Replacement AutoEncoder is its ability to keep important features of desired inferences unchanged to preserve the utility of the data. We evaluate the efficacy of the algorithm with an activity recognition task in a multi-sensing environment using extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets. We show that it can retain the recognition accuracy of state-of-the-art techniques while simultaneously preserving the privacy of sensitive information. We use a Generative Adversarial Network to attempt to detect the replacement of sensitive data with fake non-sensitive data. We show that this approach does not detect the replacement unless the network can train using the users' original unmodified data.
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