Ethical and Privacy Considerations with Location Based Data Research

TL;DR

The paper investigates privacy and ethical considerations in location-based human mobility research, addressing a gap in how personal data have been used and communicated over two decades. It catalogues mobility data sources, reviews de-anonymization risks and anonymization strategies, and evaluates how ethics and governance have been addressed in the literature. The authors find inconsistent adherence to ethical guidelines, variable reporting of dataset properties, and limited use of informed consent or IRB processes, while highlighting methods like $k$-anonymity and differential privacy that trade off utility for privacy. They propose concrete avenues for governance, transparency, and potential ethics-review mechanisms to strengthen public trust and reproducibility in mobility research.

Abstract

Networking research, especially focusing on human mobility, has evolved significantly in the last two decades and now relies on collection and analyzing larger datasets. The increasing sizes of datasets are enabled by larger automated efforts to collect data as well as by scalable methods to analyze and unveil insights, which was not possible many years ago. However, this fast expansion and innovation in human-centric research often comes at a cost of privacy or ethics. In this work, we review a vast corpus of scientific work on human mobility and how ethics and privacy were considered. We reviewed a total of 118 papers, including 149 datasets on individual mobility. We demonstrate that these ever growing collections, while enabling new and insightful studies, have not all consistently followed a pre-defined set of guidelines regarding acceptable practices in data governance as well as how their research was communicated. We conclude with a series of discussions on how data, privacy and ethics could be dealt within our community.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Size of datasets per publication date.
• Figure 2: Size of datasets per source.
• Figure 3: Size of datasets per geographical area/type coverage.
• Figure 4: Data source, sampling duration and area type per dataset. Entries sorted by date their papers were published.