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How AI can identify people even in anonymized datasets

Weekly social interactions form unique signatures that make people stand out

photo of a man in a crowd wearing a mask on the back of his head

Wearing a mask might keep you anonymous in a crowd. But in anonymized mobile phone databases, AI can still find you based on patterns in your social interactions.

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By Nikk Ogasa

How you interact with a crowd may help you stick out from it, at least to artificial intelligence.

When fed information about a target individual’s mobile phone interactions, as well as their contacts’ interactions, AI can correctly pick the target out of more than 40,000 anonymous mobile phone service subscribers more than half the time, researchers report January 25 in Nature Communications.