SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt remarks on a paper published this week in Scientific Reports in which researchers evaluated the difficulty of protecting an individual's privacy in a age of cell phone ubiquity and the wealth of data it produces.
Researchers at MIT and the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) analyzed data on 1.5 million cell phone users over 15 months and found that just four points of reference, with fairly low spatial and temporal resolution, was enough to uniquely identify 95 percent of the individuals in the system.
“There’s a concern with this data, to what extent can we preserve anonymity,” said Bettencourt. “What they are showing here, quite clearly, is that it’s very hard to preserve anonymity.”
But, the article adds, Bettencourt believes the uniqueness of people’s trajectories through cities is "precisely the type of information that analysis of cellphone data is meant to uncover."
Read the article in MIT News (March 27, 2013)
Read the paper in Scientific Reports (March 25, 2013)
Read the article in RedOrbit (March 26, 2013)