A new study by MIT Media Lab demonstrates how easy it is to identify people from the location-tracking data on their cellphones.
Just a few data points from a location-tracking cellphone are enough to identify most people, a new study found. It doesn't matter if those data are "anonymized" so they aren't linked to any identifiers such as address or phone number. Just four random points are enough to put names to 95 percent of the anonymized users in a cellphone database.
Just a few data points from a location-tracking cellphone are enough to identify most people, a new study found. It doesn't matter if those data are "anonymized" so they aren't linked to any identifiers such as address or phone number. Just four random points are enough to put names to 95 percent of the anonymized users in a cellphone database.
De Montjoye and his colleagues published their work in the journal Scientific Reports.
