Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Sci Rep. 2013;3:1376. doi: 10.1038/srep01376.
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 1/10 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.
我们研究了 150 万人的 15 个月的人类移动数据，发现人类移动轨迹具有高度独特性。实际上，在一个数据集里，每小时都能指定一个人的位置，并且空间分辨率与载波天线给出的分辨率相同，仅四个时空点就足以唯一识别 95%的个体。我们对数据进行空间和时间上的简化，以找到给定分辨率和可用外部信息的人类移动轨迹的独特性公式。该公式表明，移动轨迹的独特性大约按分辨率的 1/10 次幂衰减。因此，即使是粗略的数据集也几乎没有隐私性。这些发现对个人隐私构成了基本限制，并对专门用于保护个人隐私的框架和机构的设计具有重要意义。
