Publication Date:
2015-01-31
Description:
Large-scale data sets of human behavior have the potential to fundamentally transform the way we fight diseases, design cities, or perform research. Metadata, however, contain sensitive information. Understanding the privacy of these data sets is key to their broad use and, ultimately, their impact. We study 3 months of credit card records for 1.1 million people and show that four spatiotemporal points are enough to uniquely reidentify 90% of individuals. We show that knowing the price of a transaction increases the risk of reidentification by 22%, on average. Finally, we show that even data sets that provide coarse information at any or all of the dimensions provide little anonymity and that women are more reidentifiable than men in credit card metadata.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre -- Radaelli, Laura -- Singh, Vivek Kumar -- Pentland, Alex Sandy -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Jan 30;347(6221):536-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1256297.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 20 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. yvesalexandre@demontjoye.com. ; Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aabogade 34, Aarhus, 8200, Denmark. ; Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 20 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA. ; Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 20 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25635097" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Commerce
;
*Data Collection
;
Female
;
Humans
;
Income
;
*Information Dissemination
;
Male
;
*Privacy
;
Sex Characteristics
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
