Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility
We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Nature Publishing Group
2014
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/92263 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6031-5982 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9086-589X https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1563-800X |
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| author | de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Verleysen, Michel Blondel, Vincent D. Hidalgo Ramaciotti, Cesar A. |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Verleysen, Michel Blondel, Vincent D. Hidalgo Ramaciotti, Cesar A. |
| author_sort | de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre |
| collection | MIT |
| description | We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the [1 over 10] power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:51:28Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/92263 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:51:28Z |
| publishDate | 2014 |
| publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/922632022-10-01T22:57:10Z Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Verleysen, Michel Blondel, Vincent D. Hidalgo Ramaciotti, Cesar A. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Hidalgo, Cesar A. Blondel, Vincent D. We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the [1 over 10] power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals. Communauté française de Belgique (Actions de Recherche Concertée. Grant 09/14-017) 2014-12-10T20:19:56Z 2014-12-10T20:19:56Z 2013-03 2012-10 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 2045-2322 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/92263 De Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, and Vincent D. Blondel. “Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility.” Sci. Rep. 3 (March 25, 2013). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6031-5982 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9086-589X https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1563-800X en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep01376 Scientific Reports Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ application/pdf Nature Publishing Group Scientific Reports |
| spellingShingle | de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Verleysen, Michel Blondel, Vincent D. Hidalgo Ramaciotti, Cesar A. Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility |
| title | Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility |
| title_full | Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility |
| title_fullStr | Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility |
| title_full_unstemmed | Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility |
| title_short | Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility |
| title_sort | unique in the crowd the privacy bounds of human mobility |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/92263 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6031-5982 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9086-589X https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1563-800X |
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