pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Privacy Risk Evaluation of Human Mobility Data for Urban Transportation Planning

PI: Jan Whittington (UW), janwhit@uw.edu, ORCID: 0000-0001-6444-2447

Co PIs: none

AMOUNT & MATCH: $15,000 from PacTrans; $15,000 Match

PERFORMANCE PERIOD: 8/16/2020 – 8/15/2022

STATUS: Completed

CATEGORIES: Data, Mobility, Privacy, Risk

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DESCRIPTION: Practitioners in the public and private sector have yet to resolve the pressing issue of how to condition (e.g., aggregate, suppress, modify) data to be shared or published to ensure its usefulness in analysis while preventing the re-identification of persons represented in the data. Built on literature of the re-identifiability of persons from mobility data (e.g., De Montjoye et al. 2013), the purpose of this project is to contextualize privacy risk in the built environment and to place the resulting probabilities into a tool for public agencies. This project builds upon existing studies and addresses the problems by testing three hypotheses.

1. Linking human mobility data with built environment data increases the uniqueness of human mobility traces, thus increasing the privacy vulnerability of mobility datasets (i.e., probability of re-identification of individuals);
2. Due to the differences in travel patterns, privacy vulnerability is heterogeneous across built environments, categorized by urban density, land use mixture, and property value, and user groups, which may be categorized by age, gender, and amount of travel;
3. Built environment types require different approaches to preserve privacy (i.e. different levels of generalization and suppression) to optimize the tradeoffs between privacy protection and loss of information utility in transportation planning and operations.