Rob Matheson

The privacy risks of compiling mobility data

A new study by MIT researchers finds that the growing practice of compiling massive, anonymized datasets about people’s movement patterns is a double-edged sword: While it can provide deep insights into human behavior for research, it could also put people’s private data at risk. Companies, researchers, and other entities are beginning to collect, store, and process anonymized data that contains “location stamps” (geographical coordinates and time stamps) of users.