Understanding mobile app usage has become instrumental to service providers to optimize their online services. Meanwhile, there is a growing privacy concern that users' app usage may uniquely reveal who they are. In this paper, we seek to understand how likely a user can be uniquely re-identified in the crowd by the apps she uses. We systematically quantify the uniqueness of app usage via large-scale empirical measurements. By collaborating with a major cellular network provider, we obtained a city-scale anonymized dataset on mobile app traffic (1.37 million users, 2000 apps, 9.4 billion network connection records). Through extensive analysis, we show that the set of apps that a user has installed is already highly unique. For users with more than 10 apps, 88% of them can be uniquely re-identified by 4 random apps. The uniqueness level is even higher if we consider when and where the apps are used. We also observe that user attributes (e.g., gender, social activity, and mobility patterns) all have an impact on the uniqueness of app usage. Our work takes the first step towards understanding the unique app usage patterns for a large user population, paving the way for further research to develop privacy-protection techniques and building personalized online services.
Background: Norepinephrine (NE) is involved in auditory fear conditioning (AFC) in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, it is still unclear how it acts on neurons.
Objective: We aimed to investigate whether the activation of the β-adrenergic receptor (β-AR) improves AFC by sensitization of the prelimbic (PL) cortex at the animal, cellular and molecular levels.
Methods: In vivo single-cell electrophysiological recording was used to characterize the changes in neurons in the PL cortex after AFC. Then, PL neurons were measured under inhibition with the optogenetic method and local administration of the β-AR agonist isoprenaline (ISO) or the GABAaR agonist muscimol. Western blotting and immunohistochemistry were finally used to assess molecular changes.
Results: Noise and low-frequency tones induced similar AFC. The expression of β-ARs was upregulated in the PL cortex after fear conditioning. Microinjection of muscimol into the PL cortex blocked the conformation of AFC, whereas ISO injection facilitated AFC. Moreover, PL neurons can be distinguished into two types, with type I but not type II neurons responding to conditioned sound and being regulated by β-ARs.
Conclusion: Our results showed that β-ARs in the PL cortex regulate conditional fear learning by activating type I PL neurons.
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