Many smartphone apps record your travels vias GPS. Even if the data is stripped of any personal information (like your login or phone number), there is usually enough to learn a whole lot about you, even your name and address.
- Home address is simple – where you sleep at night
- Work address is simple – where you go for 8 hours at a time
- If you own your own home, your name will be easy to find on a county database (in the USA)
- Regularly visit schools briefly in the morning and afternoon? You have kids
- The bank you use can be determined from branch or ATM visits
Once your name has been discovered, combined with your suburb or town, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles can be found. This means there is a good chance that combing through your Facebook posts will discover your birthday…
In 2013, researchers at MIT and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium published a paper reporting on 15 months of study of human mobility data for over 1.5 million individuals. What they found is that only four spatio-temporal points are required to “uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.”
