Abstract

Understanding human mobility patterns is of interest to research and industry, from city planning to (road) traffic management to mobile networks and services. Sources for studying human are manifold, some of which were inadvertently created by mobile phone vendors. Those were leveraged and studied by researchers—but also commercially exploited to track people. With growing awareness of the inherent privacy issues, standards bodies and industry fixed those issues over time (to some extent), with limiting side effects also on sensible uses. We discuss the underlying technologies and their privacy implications along with their recent development. We then explore several cases studies for privacy-preserving mobility measurements along with their challenges, moving from individual mobility studies towards crowd estimation. We finally take a step back and look at how the (ethics) understanding of mobility research has evolved in the networking community.

Link to join virtually: https://zoom.us/j/98901725392?pwd=UWNVZVFTcVQxL2JkS0V1WVBoelBuUT09

A recording of this talk is available at the following link: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/seminars/wednesday/video/