There are emerging trends to use the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in manufacturing and related industries. Machine Learning (ML) techniques are widely used to interpret the collected IoT data for improving the company's operational excellence and predictive maintenance. In general, ML applications require high computational resource allocation and expertise. Manufacturing companies usually transfer their IIoT data to an ML-enabled third party or a cloud system. Although the transmission process uses encryption, ML applications still need decrypted data to perform ML tasks efficiently. Therefore, the third parties may have unacceptable access rights during the data processing to the content of IIoT data that contains a portrait of the production process. IIoT data may include hidden sensitive features, creating an information leakage for the companies. All these concerns prevent companies from sharing their IIoT data with third parties. This paper proposes a novel method based on the hybrid usage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Differential Privacy (DP) to preserve sensitive data in IIoT operations. We aim to sustain IIoT data privacy with minimal accuracy loss without adding high additional computational costs to the overall data processing scheme. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with publicly available data sets and a realistic IIoT data set collected from a confectionery production process.

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