Would Citizens Contribute their Personal Location Data to an Open Database? Preliminary Results from a Survey

Abstract

The amount of movement data that people record using their mobile phones via different tracking apps is vast. In a typical case the data can be viewed within the app but using the data by the third-party for other purposes is cumbersome, or practically impossible. One way to improve the situation is to establish an open trajectory data repository, where the users could save their movement tracks as open data. However, this data is considered personal data and the users may not be willing to share full trajectories as they might reveal for example their home locations. Thus, the trajectory data must be processed to minimize the amount of information that can be used to identify person while keeping the utility of the data as high as possible. We launched a survey of peoples’ opinions about sharing their movement data and what kind of privacy guarantees they would expect. Based on the preliminary results, a large part of the potential users appears to be interested in sharing their tracking data, when adequate privacypreserving pre-processing is performed.