11 Dec MIT Scientists Warn Against Practice of Mobility Data Collection
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently said that the growing practice of compiling massive, anonymized datasets about their movement patterns introduces a high risk to people’s privacy.
In analyzing mobile data containing timestamps and geographic coordinates in more than 485 million records from over 2 million users, as well as transportation data that comprised over 70 million records with timestamps for individuals moving through the city, the research team found that data containing “location stamps” could easily be used to track the mobility trajectories of how people live and work.
MIT professor Carlo Ratti, a co-author of the study, said that all data with location stamps are potentially very sensitive, and the challenges in processing large-scale data on individuals should always be considered in a way that provides adequate guarantees for the preservation of privacy.
Source: Xinhua
