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

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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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Twitter Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 1,430 tweeters who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
United States	309	22%
France	76	5%
United Kingdom	74	5%
Canada	58	4%
Germany	40	3%
Spain	33	2%
Netherlands	31	2%
Belgium	23	2%
Australia	18	1%
Other	208	15%
Unknown	560	39%

Demographic breakdown

Type	Count	As %
Members of the public	1198	84%
Scientists	170	12%
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors)	43	3%
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals)	15	1%
Unknown	4	<1%

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 998 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
United States	26	3%
United Kingdom	15	2%
Germany	7	<1%
France	6	<1%
Spain	5	<1%
Australia	4	<1%
Switzerland	4	<1%
Belgium	3	<1%
Japan	3	<1%
Other	29	3%
Unknown	896	90%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status	Count	As %
Student > Ph. D. Student	272	27%
Researcher	180	18%
Student > Master	172	17%
Student > Bachelor	69	7%
Professor > Associate Professor	46	5%
Other	167	17%
Unknown	92	9%

Readers by discipline	Count	As %
Computer Science	349	35%
Social Sciences	137	14%
Engineering	94	9%
Business, Management and Accounting	39	4%
Physics and Astronomy	31	3%
Other	207	21%
Unknown	141	14%

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1958. 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 April 2021.

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#2,340

of 17,673,294 outputs

Outputs from Scientific Reports

#33

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Outputs of similar age

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Outputs of similar age from Scientific Reports

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Altmetric has tracked 17,673,294 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.

So far Altmetric has tracked 95,235 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 16.7. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its peers.

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Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility

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Attention Score in Context