Ontology-based modeling of privacy vulnerabilities for data sharing

Abstract

When several parties want to share sensor-based datasets it can be difficult to know exactly what kinds of information can be extracted from the shared data. This is because many types of sensor data can be used to estimate indirect information, e.g., in smart buildings a CO2 stream can be used to estimate the presence and number of occupants in each room. If a data publisher does not consider these transformations of data their privacy protection of the data might be problematic. It currently requires a manual inspection by a knowledge expert of each dataset to identify possible privacy vulnerabilities for estimating indirect information. This manual process does not scale with the increasing availability of data due to the general lack of experts and the associated cost with their work. To improve this process, we propose a privacy vulnerability ontology that helps highlight the specific privacy challenges that can emerge when sharing a dataset. The ontology is intended to model data transformations, privacy attacks, and privacy risks regarding data streams. In the paper, we have used the ontology for modeling the findings of eight papers in the smart building domain. Furthermore, the ontology is applied to a case study scenario using a published dataset. The results show that the ontology can be used to highlight privacy risks in datasets.