NRC Data Collection and the Privacy by Design Principles

Nokia Research Center (NRC) in Lausanne, Switzerland has launched a rich data collection campaign during fall 2009, the purpose of which is to study user socio-geographical behavior, mobility patterns etc. of approximately 200 people. All sensors on the mobile devices (GPS, microphone, wireless interfaces etc.) were frequently activated in order to grab the most of the user contexts, to be generic enough and answer the needs of various researchers using the datasets. The data is as rich as it could be without being too intrusive into the volunteers’ lives. We therefore took particular care in preserving the privacy of the participants, while still keeping the data useful for the various future analyses. In this paper we describe the anonymization techniques that we applied to the data, how we met the principles of privacy by design, and the legal aspects with the participants and