Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage

Abstract Large-scale collection of human behavioural data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behaviour captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in large datasets encompassing millions of individuals. This makes behaviour-...

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Autores principales:	Vedran Sekara, Laura Alessandretti, Enys Mones, Håkan Jonsson
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Nature Portfolio 2021
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/3a326147e1564979a3f74d389901135e
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:3a326147e1564979a3f74d389901135e2021-12-02T12:11:34ZTemporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage10.1038/s41598-021-82294-12045-2322https://doaj.org/article/3a326147e1564979a3f74d389901135e2021-02-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82294-1https://doaj.org/toc/2045-2322Abstract Large-scale collection of human behavioural data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behaviour captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in large datasets encompassing millions of individuals. This makes behaviour-based re-identification of users across datasets possible. We study 12 months of data from 3.5 million people from 33 countries and show that although four apps are enough to uniquely re-identify 91.2% of individuals using a simple strategy based on public information, there are considerable seasonal and cultural variations in re-identification rates. We find that people have more unique app-fingerprints during summer months making it easier to re-identify them. Further, we find significant variations in uniqueness across countries, and reveal that American users are the easiest to re-identify, while Finns have the least unique app-fingerprints. We show that differences across countries can largely be explained by two characteristics of the country specific app-ecosystems: the popularity distribution and the size of app-fingerprints. Our work highlights problems with current policies intended to protect user privacy and emphasizes that policies cannot directly be ported between countries. We anticipate this will nuance the discussion around re-identifiability in digital datasets and improve digital privacy.Vedran SekaraLaura AlessandrettiEnys MonesHåkan JonssonNature PortfolioarticleMedicineRScienceQENScientific Reports, Vol 11, Iss 1, Pp 1-9 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Vedran Sekara Laura Alessandretti Enys Mones Håkan Jonsson Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage
description	Abstract Large-scale collection of human behavioural data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behaviour captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in large datasets encompassing millions of individuals. This makes behaviour-based re-identification of users across datasets possible. We study 12 months of data from 3.5 million people from 33 countries and show that although four apps are enough to uniquely re-identify 91.2% of individuals using a simple strategy based on public information, there are considerable seasonal and cultural variations in re-identification rates. We find that people have more unique app-fingerprints during summer months making it easier to re-identify them. Further, we find significant variations in uniqueness across countries, and reveal that American users are the easiest to re-identify, while Finns have the least unique app-fingerprints. We show that differences across countries can largely be explained by two characteristics of the country specific app-ecosystems: the popularity distribution and the size of app-fingerprints. Our work highlights problems with current policies intended to protect user privacy and emphasizes that policies cannot directly be ported between countries. We anticipate this will nuance the discussion around re-identifiability in digital datasets and improve digital privacy.
format	article
author	Vedran Sekara Laura Alessandretti Enys Mones Håkan Jonsson
author_facet	Vedran Sekara Laura Alessandretti Enys Mones Håkan Jonsson
author_sort	Vedran Sekara
title	Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage
title_short	Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage
title_full	Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage
title_fullStr	Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage
title_full_unstemmed	Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage
title_sort	temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage
publisher	Nature Portfolio
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/3a326147e1564979a3f74d389901135e
work_keys_str_mv	AT vedransekara temporalandculturallimitsofprivacyinsmartphoneappusage AT lauraalessandretti temporalandculturallimitsofprivacyinsmartphoneappusage AT enysmones temporalandculturallimitsofprivacyinsmartphoneappusage AT hakanjonsson temporalandculturallimitsofprivacyinsmartphoneappusage
_version_	1718394621430595584

Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage

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