ArticlePatterns (New York, N.Y.)2021
The risk of re-identification remains high even in country-scale location datasets.
Article in Patterns (New York, N.Y.), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- A scaling law to model the effectiveness of identification techniques.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Anonymization: The imperfect science of using data while preserving privacy.Science advances · 2024Review
- Commitments for Ethically Responsible Sourcing, Use, and Reuse of Patient Data in the Digital Age: Cocreation Process.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Expanding the attack surface: Robust profiling attacks threaten the privacy of sparse behavioral data.Science advances · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although anonymous data are not considered personal data, recent research has shown how individuals can often be re-identified. Scholars have argued that previous findings apply only to small-scale datasets and that privacy is preserved in large-scale datasets. Using 3 months of location data, we (1) show the risk of re-identification to decrease slowly with dataset size, (2) approximate this decrease with a simple model taking into account three population-wide marginal distributions, and (3) prove that unicity is convex and obtain a linear lower bound. Our estimates show that 93% of people would be uniquely identified in a dataset of 60M people using four points of auxiliary information, with a lower bound at 22%. This lower bound increases to 87% when five points are available. Taken together, our results show how the privacy of individuals is very unlikely to be preserved even in country-scale location datasets.
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Registered trials
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