Title:
How picking up your smartphone could reveal your identity
Published:
University of Bath, 17 February 2022
From the article:
The time a person spends on different smartphone apps is enough to identify them from a larger group in more than one in three cases say researchers, who warn of the implications for security and privacy.
ALSO SEE
Title:
Behavioral Consistency in the Digital Age
Authors:
Heather Shaw, Paul J. Taylor, David A. Ellis [et al]
Published:
Psychological Science, 17 February 2022
Abstract:
Efforts to infer personality from digital footprints have focused on behavioral stability at the trait level without considering situational dependency. We repeated a classic study of intraindividual consistency with secondary data (five data sets) containing 28,692 days of smartphone usage from 780 people. Using per-app measures of pickup frequency and usage duration, we found that profiles of daily smartphone usage were significantly more consistent when taken from the same user than from different users (d > 1.46). Random-forest models trained on 6 days of behavior identified each of the 780 users in test data with 35.8% accuracy for pickup frequency and 38.5% accuracy for duration frequency. This increased to 73.5% and 75.3%, respectively, when success was taken as the user appearing in the top 10 predictions (i.e., top 1%). Thus, situation-dependent stability in behavior is present in our digital lives, and its uniqueness provides both opportunities and risks to privacy.