Abstract
Advancements in tracking technologies have resulted in significant increases in the availability of highly accurate data on moving objects, as well as subsequent issues related to location privacy. Human mobility datasets are often released after they have been ‘anonymized’, however it has been shown that just a few locations can be uniquely associated with an individual trace or trajectory. This study focuses on measuring the ‘unicity’ or uniqueness of locations associated with individual trajectories. Due to data availability, most of the previous work on unicity has been based on coarser-scaled call detail records (CDR), while this study quantifies the unicity of finer-scale GPS movement trajectories using a subset of the Microsoft GeoLife dataset. We explore how unicity varies with (a) the number of locations used, (b) the use of temporal and directional information along with geographic, (c) decreased precision of location, time, and angle measurements, and (d) user-labeled transportation modes. In general, unicity (u) was high for location and location + time, even when only two points were compared and resolution was coarsened (u = 90% for two points with only location and u = 80% for coarsened location + time together. Direction was also fairly unique (e.g. absolute angle for five points had u = 72%), highlighting the potential privacy implications of derived attributes of personal mobility data irrespective of location. Walking was the transportation mode with the highest unicity, although it decreases more drastically as resolution is coarsened compared to unicity for car and taxi transportation modes.
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This research was funded in part by the Center for Identity at The University of Texas.
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Miller, J.A., Hoover, B. (2018). An Exploratory Analysis of the Effects of Spatial and Temporal Scale and Transportation Mode on Anonymity in Human Mobility Trajectories. In: Shaw, SL., Sui, D. (eds) Human Dynamics Research in Smart and Connected Communities. Human Dynamics in Smart Cities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73247-3_8
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