SensiTrack - A Privacy by Design Concept for Industrial IoT Applications

Abstract

In the course of further digitization of industrial manufacturing, companies are using tracking systems to monitor their production processes. This creates a large amount of data with location references, having an influence on the employees privacy - especially if personal references to employees are possible. To investigate this topic, a use case was carried out in an industrial environment. Therefore, a self-developed asset tracking (AT) system was developed and compared with a Commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) AT-System with regard to functionality and employee privacy. One mayor finding was that the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based legacy system has weaknesses with regard to privacy, e.g. the advertising-data of mobile devices of the employees were stored in the cloud application of the system provider. This data can be used to determine the position of employees. With the self-developed system these weaknesses were avoided by using a Privacy by Design (PbD) approach. Therefore, this paper focuses on employee privacy in industrial AT applications and provides a PbD concept for wireless sensor networks in industrial environments.