Privacy Protection for Preventing Data Over-Collection in Smart City

TLDR

Smart city infrastructures rely on extensive user data stored in devices, especially smartphones, but these devices often collect more data than needed, leading to privacy leakage and over‑collection that poses a serious security risk. This study examines the prevalence of data over‑collection and identifies the most common cases in smartphone applications. The authors propose a mobile‑cloud framework that centralizes user data in the cloud, thereby reducing over‑collection and enhancing data security. Experimental results confirm that the framework effectively mitigates data over‑collection.

Abstract

In smart city, all kinds of users' data are stored in electronic devices to make everything intelligent. A smartphone is the most widely used electronic device and it is the pivot of all smart systems. However, current smartphones are not competent to manage users' sensitive data, and they are facing the privacy leakage caused by data over-collection. Data over-collection, which means smartphones apps collect users' data more than its original function while within the permission scope, is rapidly becoming one of the most serious potential security hazards in smart city. In this paper, we study the current state of data over-collection and study some most frequent data over-collected cases. We present a mobile-cloud framework, which is an active approach to eradicate the data over-collection. By putting all users' data into a cloud, the security of users' data can be greatly improved. We have done extensive experiments and the experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.