Sensor data collected by Internet of Things (IoT) devices can reveal
sensitive personal information about individuals, raising significant privacy
concerns when shared with semi-trusted service providers, as they may extract
this information using machine learning models. Data obfuscation empowered by
generative models is a promising approach to generate synthetic data such that
useful information contained in the original data is preserved while sensitive
information is obscured. This newly generated data will then be shared with
service providers instead of the original sensor data. In this work, we propose
PrivDiffuser, a novel data obfuscation technique based on a denoising diffusion
model that achieves a superior trade-off between data utility and privacy by
incorporating effective guidance techniques. Specifically, we extract latent
representations that contain information about public and private attributes
from sensor data to guide the diffusion model, and impose mutual
information-based regularization when learning the latent representations to
alleviate the entanglement of public and private attributes, thereby increasing
the effectiveness of guidance. Evaluation on three real-world datasets
containing different sensing modalities reveals that PrivDiffuser yields a
better privacy-utility trade-off than the state-of-the-art in data obfuscation,
decreasing the utility loss by up to $1.81\%$ and the privacy loss by up to
$3.42\%$. Moreover, compared with existing obfuscation approaches, PrivDiffuser
offers the unique benefit of allowing users with diverse privacy needs to
protect their privacy without having to retrain the generative model.