Scientists say the apps on your phone can reveal your identity

By Gwyn Wright via SWNS

Picking up your phone could reveal your identity, warns a new study.

People can be identified simply based on the amount of time they spend on different smartphone apps, say scientists.

More than one in three people can be picked out by computer models based on their phone habits, according to the findings.

The British research team say the study has "worrying" implications for security and privacy.

For the study, psychologists from Lancaster University and Bath University looked at phone data from 780 people. They then fed 4,680 days of app usage data into statistical models.

Each day was paired with one of the 780 users, so the model learned about people’s phone habits.

They then tested whether people could be identified when the models were fed just a single day of anonymous data, which was not yet paired with a user.

People could be identified in the models, which were based on only six days of app usage data per person, based on one day of anonymous data in one-third of cases.

When the model predicted who the data belonged to, it could make a list of the most to least likely candidates.

The model could see the top 10 most likely people a day’s worth of data belonged to, and in three-quarters of cases, the correct user would be among the top ten candidates.

Police looking to find a criminal’s new phone-based on historic phone data could reduce a potential pool of 1,000 phones to just ten mobiles.

Software that is given access to someone’s standard activity logging means reasonable predictions can be made about who a user of a device is even when they are logged out.

People can be identified without any monitoring of conversations or behaviors within apps themselves.

Dr. David Ellis said: “Our models, which were trained on only six days of app usage data per person, could identify the correct person from a day of anonymous data one-third of the time.”

Co-author Professor Paul Taylor said: “In practical terms, a law enforcement investigation seeking to identify a criminal’s new phone from knowledge of their historic phone use could reduce a candidate pool of approximately 1,000 phones to ten phones, with a 25 percent risk of missing them.”

Co-author Dr. Heather Shaw said: “We found that people exhibited consistent patterns in their application usage behaviors on a day-to-day basis, such as using Facebook the most and the calculator app the least.

“In support of this, we also showed that two days of smartphone data from the same person exhibited greater similarity in-app usage patterns than two days of data from different people.

“Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that app usage data alone, which is often collected by a smartphone automatically, can potentially reveal a person’s identity.

“While providing new opportunities for law enforcement, it also poses risks to privacy if this type of data is misused.”

The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.