Anonymized Phone Location Data Not So Anonymous, Researchers Find

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on Mar 28, 2013 11:56 PM EDT
Wired; By Kim Zetter
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Anonymized mobile phone location data produces a GPS fingerprint that can be easily used to identify a user based on little more than tracking the pings a phone makes to cell towers, a new study shows. Analyzing 15 months of anonymized mobile phone data for about 1.5 million users, researchers at MIT and the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium found that it took very few pieces of data to uniquely identify 95 percent of the users — that is, trace the activity to a specific anonymous individual.

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