Crowd vigilante: Detecting sabotage in crowdsourcing

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018. Crowdsourcing is a complex and sociotechnical problem solving approach for collaboration of geographically distributed volunteer crowd to contribute to the achievement of a common task. One of the major issues faced by crowdsourced projects is the trustworthiness of the crowd. This paper presents a vision to develop a framework with supporting methods and tools for early detection of the malicious acts of sabotage in crowdsourced projects by utilizing and scaling digital forensic techniques. The idea is to utilize the crowd to build the digital evidence of sabotage with systematic collection and analysis of data from the same crowdsourced project where the threat is situated. The proposed framework aims to improve the security of the crowdsourced projects and their outcomes by building confidence about the trustworthiness of the workers.