{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/revealing-urban-area-from-mobile-positioning","title":"Revealing urban area from mobile positioning data","arxiv_id":"2407.18086","date":"2024-07-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gergő Pintér"],"abstract":"Researchers face the trade-off between publishing mobility data along with their papers while simultaneously protecting the privacy of the individuals. In addition to the fundamental anonymization process, other techniques, such as spatial discretization and, in certain cases, location concealing or complete removal, are applied to achieve these dual objectives. The primary research question is whether concealing the observation area is an adequate form of protection or whether human mobility patterns in urban areas are inherently revealing of location. The characteristics of the mobility data, such as the number of activity records or the number of unique users in a given spatial unit, reveal the silhouette of the urban landscape, which can be used to infer the identity of the city in question. It was demonstrated that even without disclosing the exact location, the patterns of human mobility can still reveal the urban area from which the data was collected. The presented locating method was tested on other cities using different open data sets and against coarser spatial discretization units. While publishing mobility data is essential for research, it was demonstrated that concealing the observation area is insufficient to prevent the identification of the urban area. Furthermore, using larger discretization units alone is an ineffective solution to the problem of the observation area re-identification. Instead of obscuring the observation area, noise should be added to the trajectories to prevent user identification.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.18086v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.18086v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"revealing-urban-area-from-mobile-positioning","repo_url":"https://github.com/pintergreg/reverse-engineering-yjmob100k-grid","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}