What ‘s happening to privacy in today’s world? On first sight it seems to get bigger. Most people in the world now live in a city, feeling pretty anonymous. An even bigger number of people don’t have to defocate out in the open anymore, but have access to a toilet. And then there’s this growing amount of people that can talk in private on their cells. But beware, these are false senses of privacy.
In Nature’s Scientific Reports researchers from Massachusets and Belgium published their findings on what you can do with mobility data. With probably thousands of other people permanently moving around you, it might feel as if your own whereabouts easily get lost in the data pool of all the others. But it turns out the way you move around is very unique.
If someone knows just four recent locations of your phone, they can allready trace your identity, at least in 95 percent of the cases. And it’s not only the phone calls you that make you traceable. Think about all the apps that retrieve your geographic location and the wifi spots you use.
Mobility data is nowadays among the most sensitive data currently being collected. And more and more people are getting plugged into this data pool. UN just found out that out of the 7 billion people on our planet, 4.5 billion people have access to working toilets, while 6 billion have access to mobile phones.
Photo: Flickr, Scallop Holden
Source: Time, Phys.org
de Montjoye YA, Hidalgo CA, Verleysen M, & Blondel VD (2013). Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility. Scientific reports, 3 PMID: 23524645
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