Privacy on the Fly: A Predictive Adversarial Transformation Network for Mobile Sensor Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Song, Tianle, Lin, Chenhao, Cao, Yang, Zhao, Zhengyu, Sun, Jiahao, Zhang, Chong, Yang, Le, Shen, Chao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Song, Tianle
Lin, Chenhao
Cao, Yang
Zhao, Zhengyu
Sun, Jiahao
Zhang, Chong
Yang, Le
Shen, Chao
author_facet Song, Tianle
Lin, Chenhao
Cao, Yang
Zhao, Zhengyu
Sun, Jiahao
Zhang, Chong
Yang, Le
Shen, Chao
contents Mobile motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes are now ubiquitously accessible by third-party apps via standard APIs. While enabling rich functionalities like activity recognition and step counting, this openness has also enabled unregulated inference of sensitive user traits, such as gender, age, and even identity, without user consent. Existing privacy-preserving techniques, such as GAN-based obfuscation or differential privacy, typically require access to the full input sequence, introducing latency that is incompatible with real-time scenarios. Worse, they tend to distort temporal and semantic patterns, degrading the utility of the data for benign tasks like activity recognition. To address these limitations, we propose the Predictive Adversarial Transformation Network (PATN), a real-time privacy-preserving framework that leverages historical signals to generate adversarial perturbations proactively. The perturbations are applied immediately upon data acquisition, enabling continuous protection without disrupting application functionality. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that PATN substantially degrades the performance of privacy inference models, achieving Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 40.11% and 44.65% (reducing inference accuracy to near-random) and increasing the Equal Error Rate (EER) from 8.30% and 7.56% to 41.65% and 46.22%. On ASR, PATN outperforms baseline methods by 16.16% and 31.96%, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07242
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Privacy on the Fly: A Predictive Adversarial Transformation Network for Mobile Sensor Data
Song, Tianle
Lin, Chenhao
Cao, Yang
Zhao, Zhengyu
Sun, Jiahao
Zhang, Chong
Yang, Le
Shen, Chao
Cryptography and Security
Mobile motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes are now ubiquitously accessible by third-party apps via standard APIs. While enabling rich functionalities like activity recognition and step counting, this openness has also enabled unregulated inference of sensitive user traits, such as gender, age, and even identity, without user consent. Existing privacy-preserving techniques, such as GAN-based obfuscation or differential privacy, typically require access to the full input sequence, introducing latency that is incompatible with real-time scenarios. Worse, they tend to distort temporal and semantic patterns, degrading the utility of the data for benign tasks like activity recognition. To address these limitations, we propose the Predictive Adversarial Transformation Network (PATN), a real-time privacy-preserving framework that leverages historical signals to generate adversarial perturbations proactively. The perturbations are applied immediately upon data acquisition, enabling continuous protection without disrupting application functionality. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that PATN substantially degrades the performance of privacy inference models, achieving Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 40.11% and 44.65% (reducing inference accuracy to near-random) and increasing the Equal Error Rate (EER) from 8.30% and 7.56% to 41.65% and 46.22%. On ASR, PATN outperforms baseline methods by 16.16% and 31.96%, respectively.
title Privacy on the Fly: A Predictive Adversarial Transformation Network for Mobile Sensor Data
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07242