Privacy in mobile participatory sensing: Current trends and future challenges

•Analysis of privacy implications and threats in participatory sensing.•Survey of recent privacy mechanisms for participatory sensing.•Identification of addressed and remaining privacy research challenges.

Mobile participatory sensing has opened the doors to numerous sensing scenarios that were unimaginable few years ago. In absence of protection mechanisms, most of these applications may however endanger the privacy of the participants and end users. In this manuscript, we highlight both sources and targets of these threats to privacy and analyze how they are addressed in recent privacy-preserving mechanisms tailored to the characteristics of participatory sensing. We further provide an overview of current trends and future research challenges in this area.