Minimizing privacy risks of location data collection

  • 23 September 2014
  • 0 replies
  • 97 views

Userlevel 7
Author: Zeljka Zorz HNS Managing Editor/ Posted on 23 September 2014.
 
With the advent of smartphones and tablets - devices users often carry with them everywhere they go - collected location data became a valuable source of information for both commercial entities and public sector organizations.

Users' location data is routinely collected at a large scale by cellular network operators, location-based services, and location-enabled social network platforms. But can this type of information reveal too much about our lives - is it a threat to our privacy?

A group of researchers from the National University of Singapore and European-based SAP have explored information about the movements (collected every 15 minutes) of over half a million individuals over a period of one week, and have discovered that "anonymizing" users by replacing their identities with a random identifier is not enough, and that "human mobility traces are highly identifiable with only a few spatio-temporal points.

 
 
 
Help Net Security/ full article here/ http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=17399

0 replies

Be the first to reply!

Reply