Towards matching user mobility traces in large-scale datasets

The problem of unicity and reidentifiability of records in large-scale databases has been studied in different contexts and approaches, with focus on preserving privacy or matching records from different data sources. With an increasing number of service providers nowadays routinely collecting location traces of their users on unprecedented scales, there is a pronounced interest in the possibility of matching records and datasets based on spatial trajectories. Extending previous work on reidentifiability of spatial data and trajectory matching, we now present the first large-scale analysis of user matchability in real mobility datasets on realistic scales, i.e. among two datasets that consist of several million people’s mobility traces for a one week interval each. We extract the relevant statistical properties which influence the matching process and provide an estimate on a performance of matching and thus the matchability of users. We derive that for individuals with typical activity in the transportation system (those making 3-4 trips per day on average), a matching algorithm based on the co-occurrence of their activities is expected to achieve a 16.8% success rate based only on a one-week long observation of their mobility traces. Extrapolating for longer time intervals, we expect a success rate of over 55% after four week long observations. We further evaluate different scenarios of data collection frequency, giving estimates of matchability over time in several realastic cases of mobility datasets.