ArticleScience advances2022
Expanding the attack surface: Robust profiling attacks threaten the privacy of sparse behavioral data.
Article in Science advances, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 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
- Concerns about using a digital mask to safeguard patient privacy.Nature medicine · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Behavioral data, collected from our daily interactions with technology, have driven scientific advances. Yet, the collection and sharing of this data raise legitimate privacy concerns, as individuals can often be reidentified. Current identification attacks, however, require auxiliary information to roughly match the information available in the dataset, limiting their applicability. We here propose an entropy-based profiling model to learn time-persistent profiles. Using auxiliary information about a single target collected over a nonoverlapping time period, we show that individuals are correctly identified 79% of the time in a large location dataset of 0.5 million individuals and 65.2% for a grocery shopping dataset of 85,000 individuals. We further show that accuracy only slowly decreases over time and that the model is robust to state-of-the-art noise addition. Our results show that much more auxiliary information than previously believed can be used to identify individuals, challenging deidentification practices and what currently constitutes legally anonymous data.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.