PrivRo : A Privacy-Preserving Crowdsourcing Service with Robust Quality Awareness

Enforcing end-to-end data encryption is vital for protecting the interests of requesters in crowdsourcing services, who initiate crowdsourcing tasks and need to pay the service provider and reward workers for the crowdsourced data. It ensures that the data encrypted by workers can be decrypted by the requester only. This yet makes it challenging to protect workers in getting rewards as the data is now only accessible to the requester, who may falsely report workers' data quality. There is thus an urgent call for enforcing end-to-end data encryption while achieving robustness against such false-reporting. However, this is not yet sufficient for worker protection because most platforms with quality awareness involve a screening process for worker selection in advance, which requires collecting personal worker profiles for assessment against task requirements and raises privacy concerns. In light of the above, we propose PrivRo, a new system framework for privacy-preserving crowdsourcing service with robust quality awareness. PrivRo supports private profile matching for secure screening as well as secure data collection with verifiable quality reporting through custom secure protocols. To our best knowledge, no prior work has simultaneously and adequately supported the secure functionalities compared to PrivRo. Extensive experiments demonstrate the practical efficiency of PrivRo. © 2024 IEEE.