Categories: Future Tech

It Takes Just Four Phone Calls To Reveal Your Identity

Researchers at MIT have found that it takes just four phone calls to reveal your personal information.

A new study led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that data derived from mobile phone networks, using just the location of radio masts, could identify the about a vast majority of people from just four pieces of information.

The discovery raises questions over the increasing use by businesses and government agencies of supposedly anonymous data, ‘The Telegraph’ reported. The researchers noted a simply anonymised data set may not contain name, home address, phone number or other obvious identifier, “yet, if individual’s patterns are unique enough,outside information can be used to link the data back to an individual.”

They examined data collected over 15 months from 1.5 million people and found that “human mobility traces are highly unique”. “A list of potentially sensitive professional and personal information that could be inferred about an individual knowing only his mobility trace was published recently by the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” researchers said. “These include the movements of a competitor sales force, attendance of a particular church or an individual’s presence in a motel or at an abortion clinic,”they said.

Researchers noted that such personal data, whether supposedly anonymised or not, was increasingly available. “All together the ubiquity of mobility data sets, the

uniqueness of human traces, and the information that can be inferred from them highlight the importance of understanding the privacy bounds of human mobility,” researchers said.

Artificial efforts to coarsen the data were found to have relatively little effect, they said. “Modern information technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones, however, magnify the uniqueness of individuals, further enhancing the traditional challenges to privacy. Mobility data is among the most sensitive data currently being collected,” researchers said in the Journal Nature.

Team TechPanda

Recent Posts

The AI-driven CFO: How Artificial Intelligence is redefining financial leadership in the tech era

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is no longer the only one responsible for budgets and…

9 hours ago

From Roblox to Python: How game development educates kids on AI principles

AI is no longer in the distant future, discussed only in university classrooms or interactive…

2 days ago

M&A: The art of the deal

The Tech Panda takes a look at recent mergers and acquisitions within various tech ecosystems…

4 days ago

As we seek to create robots that’re more ‘human’ who’s helping? AI

As robotics progresses towards creating humanoid robot helpers, our tendency is to create them in…

1 week ago

Japan’s Web3 Strategy: A Safe Haven for Chinese Investors Fleeing Capital Controls?

On June 7, 2025, Japan enacted a series of regulations aimed at enabling stronger consumer protections…

1 week ago

Agentic AI Is Reshaping Data Infrastructure—Are Data Warehouses Obsolete?

Introduction: The Signal Behind Snowflake’s CEO Change In the spring of 2024, Snowflake, a star…

1 week ago