Jason Palmer reports on a new study, “Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility:”
Individuals can be uniquely identified with just four points of location data, a study of mobile phone records shows.
Countless mobile applications make use of location data, and such information is increasingly used to tailor both services for users and advertisements.
But a study in Scientific Reports warns that human mobility patterns are unique identifiers, even when data are scarce.
Read more on BBC. Their link to the study doesn’t work for me, but you can access the full study here.
Reference:
Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen & Vincent D. Blondel
Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 1376 doi:10.1038/srep01376
Received 01 October 2012 Accepted 04 February 2013 Published 25 March 2013