A report on personally identifiable sensor data from smartphone devices

TL;DR

This paper examines the types of sensor data collected by smartphones, assesses their potential privacy risks, and discusses implications for user privacy and GDPR compliance.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of smartphone sensor data types and their privacy implications, highlighting potential threats to user identity.

Findings

Certain sensor data can uniquely identify users

Many sensors pose privacy risks if data is misused

Implications for GDPR compliance are discussed

Abstract

An average smartphone is equipped with an abundance of sensors to provide a variety of vital functionalities and conveniences. The data from these sensors can be collected in order to find trends or discover interesting correlations in the data but can also be used by nefarious entities for the purpose of revealing the identity of the persons who generated this data.In this paper, we seek to identify what types of sensor data can be collected on a smartphone and which of those types can pose a threat to user privacy by looking into the hardware capabilities of modern smartphone devices and how smartphone data is used in the literature. We then summarize some implications that this information could have on the GDPR.