Scientists found Privacy at High Risk in Compiling users’ Mobility Data

San Francisco: Scientists have found that people’s privacy is at high risk as there is a growing practice of compiling massive, anonymized datasets about their movement patterns, mentioned a report. The researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) made the first study on “matchability” of user mobility by analyzing two large-scale datasets from a mobile network operator and a local transportation system in Singapore, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

According to the report, the mobile data contained timestamps and geographic coordinates in over 485 million records from over 2 million users, while the transportation data comprised over 70 million records with timestamps for individuals moving through the city. They found data containing “location stamps” — information with geographical coordinates and time stamps — could be used to easily track the mobility trajectories of how people live and work. Those sensitive data can be obtained from mobile phone records, credit card transactions, public transportation smart cards, social media accounts and other mobile apps, said the MIT study published on Friday in IEEE Transactions on Big Data.(IANS)

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