Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 13, 2026

Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data
Published on: July 27, 2018
Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye1, César A Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen
1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. yva@mit.edu
Abstract:
We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.
Related Concept Videos
Social Traps
Naturalistic Observations
Social Foundations of Self IV: Self in Digital Communication
Deindividuation
Personal Identity
Social Foundations of Self II: The Generalized Other

