The scientists state that any mobile phone user can be easily identified after analyzing little information about their location.
Every time the phone is connected to the network, its owner’s location and movement is traced. It is known that this data is illegally given to the third parties in order to drive services for the user and to target advertisements.
The authors of the study entitled “Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility” warns that it is possible to identify a user from only four data points.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Catholic University of Louvain for 15 months studied anonymised mobile phone records for 1.5 million individuals.
The researchers revealed "mobility traces" the evident paths of each mobile phone. They needed only four locations and times to identify a particular user.
“In the 1930s, it was shown that you need 12 points to uniquely identify and characterize a fingerprint,” said the study's lead author Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye of MIT.
“What we did here is the exact same thing but with mobility traces. The way we move and the behavior is so unique that four points are enough to identify 95% of people,” he added.
Experts claim that users usually provide their personal information themselves, for example, in social networks, publishing geo-located tweets.
Privacy advocates point out that the current study raises many questions about the violation of users’ privacy.
Sam Smith of Privacy International said: “Our mobile phones report location and contextual data to multiple organisations with varying privacy policies. Any benefits we receive from such services are far outweighed by the threat that these trends pose to our privacy, and although we are told that we have a choice about how much information we give over, in reality individuals have no choice whatsoever.”
