Contrasting social and non-social sources of predictability in human mobility

TL;DR

This study compares social and non-social sources of predictability in human mobility, revealing that non-social colocators can provide substantial predictive information, raising privacy concerns about mobility data sharing.

Contribution

It introduces a colocation network to distinguish social from non-social mobility patterns and quantifies their relative predictive power.

Findings

Social ties generally provide more predictive information than non-social colocators.

3-7 colocators can match the predictive power of a top social tie.

Non-social colocators can replace up to 85% of the predictability derived from social ties.

Abstract

Social structures influence a variety of human behaviors including mobility patterns, but the extent to which one individual's movements can predict another's remains an open question. Further, latent information about an individual's mobility can be present in the mobility patterns of both social and non-social ties, a distinction that has not yet been addressed. Here we develop a "colocation" network to distinguish the mobility patterns of an ego's social ties from those of non-social colocators, individuals not socially connected to the ego but who nevertheless arrive at a location at the same time as the ego. We apply entropy and predictability measures to analyse and bound the predictive information of an individual's mobility pattern and the flow of that information from their top social ties and from their non-social colocators. While social ties generically provide more information than non-social colocators, we find that significant information is present in the aggregation of non-social colocators: 3-7 colocators can provide as much predictive information as the top social tie, and colocators can replace up to 85% of the predictive information about an ego, compared with social ties that can replace up to 94% of the ego's predictability. The presence of predictive information among non-social colocators raises privacy concerns: given the increasing availability of real-time mobility traces from smartphones, individuals sharing data may be providing actionable information not just about their own movements but the movements of others whose data are absent, both known and unknown individuals.