Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data

Abstract

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work contends that peoples' behavior can yield patterns of both significant commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations, articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and also follow best-practices.

Using Location Data From Mobile Phones to Study Participation in Mass Protests

“…In addition, researchers could be offered the option of unmediated access to “safe” data sets like the one we acquired, consisting of count data that have been preaggregated by geographical home locations (cf. Sanches et al 2014). The conviction that this type of data set can substantially advance knowledge without risking the privacy and wellbeing of unwitting phone owners is an important reason why this article has gone into such detail concerning the preparation and processing of locality-aggregated data sets and the specific ways in which they can advance social research on street protests.…”

Data Bites Man

“…One could imagine leveraging existing mobile phones to collect some of the data without direct contact with the population. For example, technologies have already been proposed that make use of passively collected data from sources such as mobile phone usage data from residents of a country or a certain area in order to infer mobility patterns, for the purposes of disease surveillance [11,40,47]. This could reduce the burden of data collection on the daily life of the population, as some of this data can be inferred passively, but it would require additional privacy and ethical considerations [40].…”

Extracting the patterns of truthfulness from political information systems in Serbia

“…Governments across the world are using various systems for tracking public opinion and citizen activity and some concerns have recently been raised about the significant decrease of privacy in the modern age (Danna 2002;Cate et al 2012;Custers et al 2013;Sanches et al 2013;Vaidya 2012; Mostafa and El-Masry 2013). Transparency is important in order to prevent corruption and the abuse of power.…”