Key Challenges in Sanitizing Transportation Data to Protect Sensitive Information

Matt Bishop

Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis

Abstract: As new mobility services such as ridehailing and shared micromobility have grown, so has the quantity of data available about how and where people travel. Transportation data provides government agencies and transportation companies with valuable information that can be used for identifying traffic patterns, predicting infrastructure needs, informing city planning, and other purposes. However, the data may also contain sensitive information that can identify individuals, the beginning and ending points of their trips, and other details that raise concerns about personal privacy. Even if a traveler’s name and address is suppressed, adversaries could use other parts of the information such as trip origin and destination to learn an individual’s identity and their habits. Similarly, another transportation company competing with the company that collected the data could potentially steal their customer base if they can use the data to obtain proprietary information such as frequent dropoff/pick-up locations, vehicle positioning, travel routes, or algorithms for assigning vehicles to clients.

Keywords: Engineering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/5rh4p7cw.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:itsdav:qt5rh4p7cw

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().