Location Privacy in Mobile Big Data:User Identifiability via Habitat Region Representation

Mobile big data collected by mobile network operators is of interest to many research communities and industries for its remarkable values.However,such spatiotemporal information may lead to a harsh threat to subscribers’privacy.This work focuses on subscriber privacy vulnerability assessment in terms of user identifiability across two datasets with significant detail reduced mobility representation.In this paper,we propose an innovative semantic spatiotemporal representation for each subscriber based on the geographic information,termed as daily habitat region,to approximate the subscriber’s daily mobility coverage with far lesser information compared with original mobility traces.The daily habitat region is realized via convex hull extraction on the user’s daily spatiotemporal traces.As a result,user identification can be formulated to match two records with the maximum similarity score between two convex hull sets,obtained by our proposed similarity measures based on cosine distance and permutation hypothesis test.Experiments are conducted to evaluate our proposed innovative mobility representation and user identification algorithms,which also demonstrate that the subscriber’s mobile privacy is under a severe threat even with significantly reduced spatiotemporal information.

CPFinder: Finding an unknown caller's profession from anonymized mobile phone data

Identifying an unfamiliar caller's profession is important to protect citizens' personal safety and property. Owing to the limited data protection of various popular online services in some countries, such as taxi hailing and ordering takeouts, many users presently encounter an increasing number of phone calls from strangers. The situation may be aggravated when criminals pretend to be such service delivery staff, threatening the user individuals as well as the society. In addition, numerous people experience excessive digital marketing and fraudulent phone calls because of personal information leakage. However, previous works on malicious call detection only focused on binary classification, which does not work for the identification of multiple professions. We observed that web service requests issued from users' mobile phones might exhibit their application preferences, spatial and temporal patterns, and other profession-related information. This offers researchers and engineers a hint to identify unfamiliar callers. In fact, some previous works already leveraged raw data from mobile phones (which includes sensitive information) for personality studies. However, accessing users' mobile phone raw data may violate the more and more strict private data protection policies and regulations (e.g., General Data Protection Regulation). We observe that appropriate statistical methods can offer an effective means to eliminate private information and preserve personal characteristics, thus enabling the identification of the types of mobile phone callers without privacy concerns. In this paper, we develop CPFinder —- a system that exploits privacy-preserving mobile data to automatically identify callers who are divided into four categories of users: taxi drivers, delivery and takeouts staffs, telemarketers and fraudsters, and normal users (other professions). Our evaluation of an anonymized dataset of 1,282 users over a period of 3 months in Shanghai City shows that the CPFinder can achieve accuracies of more than 75.0% and 92.4% for multiclass and binary classifications, respectively.

功能-要素-流视角下的乡村活力空间识别与评价——以中国杭州市临安区为例

Rural vitality is the life force expressed by a combination of endogenous dynamics and external influences. Exploring the complex relationship between rural functions, elements and flows could achieve sustainable rural development. This study constructed a theoretical framework guided by the four functions of production, living, ecology and culture with the support of mobile big data. Furthermore, the network centrality of villages was estimated to reflect the intensity of urban-rural social mobility ties. The results indicated marked spatial disparities in rural vitality, and the coupling of ecological-cultural vitality has a high degree of coherence. Four rural vitality grades were identified: high level(38, 14.08%), medium-high level(66, 24.44%), medium-low level(110, 40.74%) and low level(56, 20.74%), covering 270 administrative village units. The flow intensity of social linkage elements is consistent with rural vitality and the socioeconomic spillover effect of urban centers on neighboring villages was noticeable. Topographic complexity negatively affected the living function, mainly in the T1 and T2 terrain gradients;the rural ecological function was not fully correlated with urban adjacency, and proximity could lead to adverse effects such as urban sprawl and resource destruction. The application of this study is to explore the importance of “flow” by utilizing mobile big data to refine the evaluation unit to the village scale. Accelerating the construction of network coverage and information interconnection and promoting the elemental flow of people, transportation and information between urban and rural areas are important ways to enhance rural vitality.