P&C Committee Discusses Privacy Protections for Transportation Data in Big Data Environment

摘要

The Privacy and Confidentiality (P&C) Committee organized an invited session at the 2018 Joint Statistical Meetings that focused on protecting participants' privacy in large-scale transportation studies. Jacob Bournazian of the Energy Information Administration and former chair of the P&C committee organized the session. Stephanie Shipp of the University of Virginia chaired the session, and Tom Krenzke of Westat discussed the papers. As background, transportation data include detailed spatial and temporal information collected from roadside sensors, vehicles, mobile phones, and navigation devices. Identifying the travel behavior of individuals, families, and communities is an important part of traffic management and planning. These transportation data also support the research, analysis, and planning of transport systems and future planning for building transportation infrastructure. However, collecting, accessing, or releasing information that identifies an individual's travel patterns without his or her knowledge or consent may cause privacy violations under existing laws, even if the information is used for a larger social benefit.