Our paper titled “Influence of tracking duration on the privacy of individual mobility graphs” was published by the Journal of Location Based Services! In this work, we use a GPS tracking dataset and analyze how the tracking duration affects the risk for users to be re-identified; i.e., by matching to previously stored tracking data. It is well known that the tracking data of a user is quite unique and can be matched to stored data easily; however, we study the risk of a representation of tracking data that is already privatised, namely so-called location graphs. Location graphs do not reveal the geocoordinates or time stamps of the places that a user visited, but just the topology of the mobility behaviour. Nevertheless, users can be re-identified with a top-1 accuracy of up to 20%, and the re-identification risk strongly depends on the tracking duration of the user, as well as the duration of the stored data (pool), as shown in the figure below. Check out our paper and code for more information!
