Privacy guarantees for personal mobility data in humanitarian response.

ABSTRACT: Personal mobility data from mobile phones and other sensors are increasingly used to inform policymaking during pandemics, natural disasters, and other humanitarian crises. However, even aggregated mobility traces can reveal private information about individual movements to potentially malicious actors. This paper develops and tests an approach for releasing private mobility data, which provides formal guarantees over the privacy of the underlying subjects. Specifically, we (1) introduce an algorithm for constructing differentially private mobility matrices and derive privacy and accuracy bounds on this algorithm; (2) use real-world data from mobile phone operators in Afghanistan and Rwanda to show how this algorithm can enable the use of private mobility data in two high-stakes policy dec

SUBMITTER: Kohli N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11574092 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature