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 1,548 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	335	22%
United Kingdom	81	5%
France	71	5%
Canada	58	4%
Germany	39	3%
Spain	38	2%
Netherlands	32	2%
Belgium	23	1%
Italy	19	1%
Other	220	14%
Unknown	632	41%

Demographic breakdown

Type	Count	As %
Members of the public	1302	84%
Scientists	178	11%
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors)	50	3%
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals)	14	<1%
Unknown	4	<1%

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 1,085 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
United States	26	2%
United Kingdom	14	1%
Germany	7	<1%
France	6	<1%
Spain	5	<1%
Switzerland	4	<1%
Australia	4	<1%
Japan	3	<1%
Portugal	3	<1%
Other	28	3%
Unknown	985	91%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status	Count	As %
Student > Ph. D. Student	284	26%
Student > Master	184	17%
Researcher	181	17%
Student > Bachelor	78	7%
Professor > Associate Professor	48	4%
Other	181	17%
Unknown	129	12%

Readers by discipline	Count	As %
Computer Science	372	34%
Social Sciences	141	13%
Engineering	100	9%
Business, Management and Accounting	40	4%
Physics and Astronomy	31	3%
Other	221	20%
Unknown	180	17%

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2359. 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 26 July 2022.

All research outputs

#2,666

of 21,821,479 outputs

Outputs from Scientific Reports

#36

of 116,687 outputs

Outputs of similar age

of 174,714 outputs

Outputs of similar age from Scientific Reports

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Altmetric has tracked 21,821,479 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 116,687 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 17.9. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its peers.

Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 174,714 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its contemporaries.

We're also able to compare this research output to 3 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than all of them

Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility

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Attention Score in Context