Big Broker is Tracking You! A Privacy Assessment of Large-Scale Location Trace Datasets

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Abstract
Large-scale location trace datasets are being col-lected by data brokers and sold for significant financial gains. These datasets are collected continuously through background services in smartphone applications, typically without users' in-formed consent. While businesses leverage these data to derive valuable crowd insights, it raises profound privacy concerns for individuals. When such datasets fall into the hands of malicious actors, large-scale blackmail, coercion, and extortion schemes can be set up. This paper demonstrates the risks posed by large-scale location trace datasets, demonstrating how adversaries can exploit them to: (i) infer sensitive personal locations, such as home and workplace addresses, (ii) reveal the identity behind the traces, and (iii) construct social graphs by linking the location traces of multiple individuals. Our research is unique compared to related work in the sense that it is the first in-depth privacy assessment of five large-scale datasets purchased from two different data brokers that collect accurate location traces without informed consent on a continuous basis. Multiple experiments demonstrate the feasibility, magnitude and practical impact of diverse privacy attacks. Finally, we highlight realistic abuse scenarios, and propose solutions to mitigate these privacy concerns.

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