Location Privacy Challenged by Data From Friends, Strangers

Data From Friends, Strangers Shows Where You Are

Futurity.org, Lindsey Valich, April 11, 2022

An international team of scientists determined that data from friends and strangers can be used to predict someone's location, even when their personal devices' data-tracking functions are inactive. The University of Rochester's Gourab Ghoshal and colleagues analyzed three location-based social network datasets compiling millions of check-ins on applications like Brightkite, Facebook, and Foursquare, and one call-data record with over 22 million calls by almost 36,000 anonymous users. The team applied information theory and measures of entropy to learn that the mobility patterns of people with social ties to an individual incorporate as much as 95% of the data required to anticipate that individual's movements; even data from strangers could be used to predict up to 85% of a person’s movements. ...