Real-Time Utility Assessment of Privacy-Anonymized Data: A Cross-Domain Framework for Smart Cities

초록

Smart cities collect lots of data from sources like traffic systems and sensors. This data is vital for improving services such as transport management, public safety, energy saving, and citizen involvement. However, keeping people's privacy secure by making data anonymous can make the data less useful. Anonymization methods include mix-zones, pseudonymization, and data masking. Existing systems often evaluate the usefulness of data after it's processed, but usually can not adjust to changes in real-time or work well across different fields. It also does not typically consider fairness for individuals or integrate well with privacy-preserving data methods on devices, which are crucial for city services needing quick responses. This paper presents a new system to assess anonymized data in smart cities in real-time. The system includes four main components: 1) a real-time tool that continuously monitors how anonymization affects data quality across various areas; 2) a utility model that adjusts usefulness scores based on the needs of different smart city services; 3) a module that detects and addresses unfair differences in data usefulness caused by anonymization; and 4) a data combination layer that operates well on devices, allowing on-site decision-making while complying with privacy regulations like GDPR. The framework is tested with multiple real-world transportation datasets, anonymized in different ways, and applied to tasks like traffic prediction, anomaly detection, and location-based services. The results demonstrate that the framework provides accurate data usefulness estimation with minimal computing effort, and it offers fair, situation-specific trade-offs in usefulness in real-time. This work connects privacy and usefulness, offering a scalable solution for responsibly using anonymized data in smart city environments. The framework is validated on both transportation and smart energy datasets, demonstrating consistent improvements in privacy-utility-fairness balance and confirming its generality across smart-city domains.

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