Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata
Large-scale data sets of human behavior have the potential to fundamentally transform the way we fight diseases, design cities, or perform research. Metadata, however, contain sensitive information. Understanding the privacy of these data sets is key to their broad use and, ultimately, their impact....
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
2015
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96321 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8053-9983 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9086-589X |
| _version_ | 1811096764630958080 |
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| author | Radaelli, L. de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Singh, Vivek Kumar Pentland, Alex Paul |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Radaelli, L. de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Singh, Vivek Kumar Pentland, Alex Paul |
| author_sort | Radaelli, L. |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Large-scale data sets of human behavior have the potential to fundamentally transform the way we fight diseases, design cities, or perform research. Metadata, however, contain sensitive information. Understanding the privacy of these data sets is key to their broad use and, ultimately, their impact. We study 3 months of credit card records for 1.1 million people and show that four spatiotemporal points are enough to uniquely reidentify 90% of individuals. We show that knowing the price of a transaction increases the risk of reidentification by 22%, on average. Finally, we show that even data sets that provide coarse information at any or all of the dimensions provide little anonymity and that women are more reidentifiable than men in credit card metadata. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T16:48:41Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/96321 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T16:48:41Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/963212022-09-29T21:37:03Z Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata Radaelli, L. de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Singh, Vivek Kumar Pentland, Alex Paul Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Singh, Vivek Kumar Pentland, Alex Paul Large-scale data sets of human behavior have the potential to fundamentally transform the way we fight diseases, design cities, or perform research. Metadata, however, contain sensitive information. Understanding the privacy of these data sets is key to their broad use and, ultimately, their impact. We study 3 months of credit card records for 1.1 million people and show that four spatiotemporal points are enough to uniquely reidentify 90% of individuals. We show that knowing the price of a transaction increases the risk of reidentification by 22%, on average. Finally, we show that even data sets that provide coarse information at any or all of the dimensions provide little anonymity and that women are more reidentifiable than men in credit card metadata. European Commission. Framework Programme 7 (Marie Curie Action. Grant 264994) U.S. Army Research Laboratory (Cooperative Agreement W911NF-09-2-0053) Belgian American Educational Foundation, inc. Wallonie-Bruxelles International 2015-04-01T18:36:44Z 2015-04-01T18:36:44Z 2015-01 2014-05 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0036-8075 1095-9203 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96321 De Montjoye, Y.-A., L. Radaelli, V. K. Singh, and A. Pentland. “Unique in the Shopping Mall: On the Reidentifiability of Credit Card Metadata.” Science 347, no. 6221 (January 29, 2015): 536–539. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8053-9983 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9086-589X en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1256297 Science Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. application/pdf American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) de Montjoye |
| spellingShingle | Radaelli, L. de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre Singh, Vivek Kumar Pentland, Alex Paul Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata |
| title | Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata |
| title_full | Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata |
| title_fullStr | Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata |
| title_full_unstemmed | Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata |
| title_short | Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata |
| title_sort | unique in the shopping mall on the reidentifiability of credit card metadata |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96321 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8053-9983 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9086-589X |
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