Mobile phone location data is a newly emerging data source of great potential to support human mobility research. However, recent studies have indicated that many users can be easily re-identified based on their unique activity patterns. Privacy protection procedures will usually change the original data and cause a loss of data utility for analysis purposes. Therefore, the need for detailed data for activity analysis while avoiding potential privacy risks presents a challenge. The aim of this study is to reveal the re-identification risks from a Chinese city’s mobile users and to examine the quantitative relationship between re-identification risk and data utility for an aggregated mobility analysis. The first step is to apply two reported attack models, the top N locations and the spatio-temporal points, to evaluate the re-identification risks in Shenzhen City, a metropolis in China. A spatial generalization approach to protecting privacy is then proposed and implemented, and spatially aggregated analysis is used to assess the loss of data utility after privacy protection. The results demonstrate that the re-identification risks in Shenzhen City are clearly different from those in regions reported in Western countries, which prove the spatial heterogeneity of re-identification risks in mobile phone location data. A uniform mathematical relationship has also been found between re-identification risk (x) and data (y) utility for both attack models: y = -axb+c, (a, b, c>0; 0
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China;Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China;Department of Geography, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, United States of America;State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China;State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China;Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China;Department of Urban Planning and Design, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Recommended Citation:
Ling Yin,Qian Wang,Shih-Lung Shaw,et al. Re-Identification Risk versus Data Utility for Aggregated Mobility Research Using Mobile Phone Location Data[J]. PLOS ONE,2015-01-01,10(10)