Report for: Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility

Title	Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility
Published in	Scientific Reports, March 2013
DOI	10.1038/srep01376
Pubmed ID	23524645
Authors	Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, Vincent D. Blondel
Abstract	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.

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Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
United States	311	24%
United Kingdom	65	5%
Canada	52	4%
Germany	43	3%
France	39	3%
Netherlands	31	2%
Spain	29	2%
Australia	19	1%
Belgium	16	1%
Other	191	15%
Unknown	485	38%

Demographic breakdown

Type	Count	As %
Members of the public	1071	84%
Scientists	156	12%
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors)	42	3%
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals)	10	<1%
Unknown	2	<1%

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 794 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
United States	28	4%
United Kingdom	15	2%
Germany	9	1%
France	7	<1%
Spain	5	<1%
Switzerland	4	<1%
Australia	4	<1%
Canada	3	<1%
South Africa	3	<1%
Other	28	4%
Unknown	688	87%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status	Count	As %
Student > Ph. D. Student	230	29%
Researcher	151	19%
Student > Master	136	17%
Student > Bachelor	57	7%
Professor > Associate Professor	41	5%
Other	179	23%

Readers by discipline	Count	As %
Computer Science	316	40%
Social Sciences	116	15%
Engineering	76	10%
Unspecified	64	8%
Business, Management and Accounting	29	4%
Other	193	24%

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This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1694. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 June 2019.

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#1,075

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#16

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Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility

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