Revealing urban area from mobile positioning data
Gerg\H{o} Pint\'er

TL;DR
This paper investigates whether concealing the observation area in mobility data effectively protects urban location privacy, finding that mobility patterns can still reveal the city even without exact locations, and suggests adding noise to trajectories as a better solution.
Contribution
It demonstrates that concealing the observation area is insufficient for privacy, and proposes adding noise to trajectories as a more effective method.
Findings
Mobility patterns can reveal the urban area even without exact locations.
Concealing the observation area does not prevent city identification.
Larger spatial discretization units are ineffective for privacy protection.
Abstract
Researchers face the trade-off between publishing mobility data along with their papers while simultaneously protecting the privacy of the individuals. In addition to the fundamental anonymization process, other techniques, such as spatial discretization and, in certain cases, location concealing or complete removal, are applied to achieve these dual objectives. The primary research question is whether concealing the observation area is an adequate form of protection or whether human mobility patterns in urban areas are inherently revealing of location. The characteristics of the mobility data, such as the number of activity records or the number of unique users in a given spatial unit, reveal the silhouette of the urban landscape, which can be used to infer the identity of the city in question. It was demonstrated that even without disclosing the exact location, the patterns of human…
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Taxonomy
TopicsHuman Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Geographic Information Systems Studies
