Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy: A Vision of Convergence

The comprehension of phenomena related to movement — not only of people and vehicles but also of animals and other moving objects — has always been a key issue in many areas of scientific investigation or social analysis. The human geographer, for instance, studies the flows of migrant populations with reference to geography — places that are sources and destinations of migrations — and time. The historian, another example, studies military campaigns and related movements of armies and populations. (A famous instance is the depiction of Napoleon’s March on Moscow, published by C.J. Minard in 1861, discussed in Chap. 1 of this book (see Fig. 1.1); this figure represents with eloquence the fate of Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812–1813, by showing the movement of the army together with its dramatically diminishing size during its advance and subsequent retreat.) The ethologist studies animal behaviour by the analysis of movement patterns, based on field observations or, sometimes, on data from tracking devices.