Mobile terminals generate all kinds of data about users, but recently researchers from MIT they published a study that suggests the fact that the data issued by them have a greater degree of uniqueness than fingerprints. Practically, the police, for example, can discover with much greater accuracy the perpetrator of a crime with the help of geolocation data provided by a mobile terminal. By practically analyzing the pings given by the mobile phones to the mobile phone towers, the researchers were able to identify various people based on the locations they frequented.
A new paper published in Nature called "Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility," claims that 95% of mobile phone users can be identified based entirely on their patterns of movement. Mobile phones routinely ping cell phone antennas as customers travel from place to place, even if the phone is not being used–and even if the phone is turned off. The only way to prevent a phone from pinging antennas is to physically remove the battery.
A mobile phone operator in Belgium provided 1.5 million anonymous logs of its users, and researchers found that 95% of mobile phones can be used to identify their owners. The methods of identifying users based on the information provided by mobile phones would already be used by the police and the secret services for this exact purpose. The interesting part is that all the data was collected between 2006 and 2007, so before smartphones with GPS became popular, so theoretically now identifying users should be much easier.
