Scrubbed geo-location data not so anonymous after all

Your commute = your fingerprint

Anonymized data collected from GPS-enabled devices may not be as anonymous as you think, according to researchers who show that knowing someone's general home and work locations can be enough to identify an individual uniquely.

The findings, by Philippe Golle and Kurt Partridge of PARC, or the Palo Alto Research Center, are significant, given the proliferation of devices that monitor a user's geographic location using global positioning system and other technologies. At the same time, a growing number of websites monitor user location to offer restaurant recommendations and other services.