Study warns of privacy measures to hide the identity of phone users

INA-  sources

According to the study, which was published by the newspaper “Nature Communications”, it has become possible to determine the identities of people through a few details derived from how they communicate through an application such as WhatsApp.
 
Yves-Alexandre de Mongui, a co-author of the study, told AFP that it was time to “renew the concept of anonymity.”
 
The researcher’s team obtained anonymous data from more than 40,000 cell phone users, the majority of which was information gleaned from messaging apps and other “interaction” data.
 
 
 
The team then “attacked” the data, looking for patterns in those interactions, a technique that malicious actors could use.
 
Through data whose content is limited to people who are in direct contact with the target individual, the team was able to identify the latter in 15 percent of cases.
 
With the addition of additional interactions with those individuals who are in direct contact, the team was able to identify 52 percent of the people.
 
The study, which was prepared by researchers from the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Italy, said that the results provide evidence that many data remain identifiable “even over long periods of time.”
 
“These results strongly suggest that current practices may not meet the anonymity standard imposed by (European regulators),” especially with regard to the ability to link data to a user’s identity, the study authors added.
 
 
 
De Mongui stressed that the study was not intended to criticize a particular company or legal system.
 
 
 
He pointed out that the traditional concept of anonymity “is no longer useful,” stressing that this does not mean abandoning anonymity.
 
He considered that the solution may lie in not allowing applications to access large sets of data.