Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility

TheWindBringeth · Mar 26, 2013

http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/full/srep01376.html

We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique.
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Mobility data contains the approximate whereabouts of individuals and can be used to reconstruct individuals' movements across space and time.
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While in the past, mobility traces were only available to mobile phone carriers, the advent of smartphones and other means of data collection has made these broadly available. For example, Apple® recently updated its privacy policy to allow sharing the spatio-temporal location of their users with “partners and licensees”. 65.5B geo-tagged payments are made per year in the US while Skyhook wireless is resolving 400 M user's WiFi location every day. Furthermore, it is estimated that a third of the 25B copies of applications available on Apple's App StoreSM access a user's geographic location and that the geo-location of ~50% of all iOS and Android traffic is available to ad networks.
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A simply anonymized dataset does not contain name, home address, phone number or other obvious identifier. Yet, if individual's patterns are unique enough, outside information can be used to link the data back to an individual.
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All together, the ubiquity of mobility datasets, the uniqueness of human traces, and the information that can be inferred from them highlight the importance of understanding the privacy bounds of human mobility. We show that the uniqueness of human mobility traces is high and that mobility datasets are likely to be re-identifiable using information only on a few outside locations.
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mirimir · Mar 26, 2013

I wonder what they'd make of Tor users

Over time, they'd all look alike.

hidden · Mar 27, 2013

Great find. This site is like a roller coaster; I come here to be terrified.

Another quote:

Therefore knowing as few as four spatio-temporal points taken at random (Ip = 4) is enough to uniquely characterize 95% of the traces amongst 1.5 M users. At most eleven points are enough to uniquely characterize all considered traces.
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mirimir · Mar 27, 2013

Right: home, coffee shop, work and nightclub

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