Humanitarian Use of Mobile Phone Metadata: A Potential Tool in the Fight Against Ebola

While African countries are not data-rich environments, they are rich in mobile phones — with 89 phones for every 100 inhabitants. The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is putting the spotlight on how these phones — specifically the metadata they gather — can become an important tool in assisting in humanitarian efforts.

The metadata in call detail records maintained by mobile phone operators — who called whom, at what time, and from where — offers a rich source of data that have already been used to understand, among other things, importation routes for infectious disease, patterns of migration, or economic transactions. But efforts to share this data in the fight against Ebola have run into roadblocks.

In a Brookings paper published this week, we examine the privacy challenges and legal barriers to the use of mobile phone data for development through two case studies inspired by previous research.

Photo: Ken Banks, kiwanja.net from Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kiwanja/3169412893

One, modeled on previous research, involves the use of location metadata to track the spread of infectious diseases within and among countries. The second case considers the use of mobile phone data to define subgroups based on specific traits and behaviors, and then contact these subgroups for interventions.

From these case studies, we draw several recommendations to facilitate the use of mobile phone metadata for humanitarian purposes — such as addressing the Ebola outbreak — in ways that will protect against the misuse of information:

1. There is a clear need for companies, NGOs, researchers, privacy experts, and governments to agree on a set of best practices for new privacy-conscientious metadata sharing models in different development use cases — a wider and higher-level discussion of the kind our research group at the MIT Media Lab, and broader working group conducted. Such best practices would help carriers and policymakers strike the right balance between privacy and utility in the use of metadata, make it easier and less risky for carriers to support humanitarian and research uses, and for researchers and NGOs to use metadata appropriately.
2. Such best practices should accept that there are currently no perfect ways to de-identify data. There will always be some risk associated with balancing the public good and personal privacy. While much more research is needed in computational privacy, widespread adoption of existing techniques as standards could enable this trend of sharing data in a privacy-conscientious way.
3. Standards and practices, as well as legal regulation, also need to address and incorporate trust mechanisms for humanitarian sharing of data in a more nuanced way. The recognition of trusted third parties and systems to manage datasets, enable detailed audits, and control the use of data could enable greater sharing of these data among multiple parties while providing a barrier against risks.
4. There is a need for governments to adopt laws and rules that simplify the collection and use of mobile phone metadata for research and public good purposes. Governments should also seek to harmonize laws on the sharing of metadata with common identifiers across national borders. Clear and consistent rules will help, but only if they take a pragmatic and privacy-conscientious approach to anonymization, cross-border transfers, and novel uses that enable public good uses of data and allow for public health emergencies and other valuable research.

Research based on mobile phone data, computational privacy, and data protection rules all may seem secondary when confronted by the challenges of poverty, disease, and basic economic growth. But such research is on the critical path to realizing the great potential of information technology to help address these critical problems.

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Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is a PhD student in the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab.

Jake Kendall is a Program Officer in the Financial Services for the Poor Initiative at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The statements and opinions in this document are the author’s alone and in no way reflect the opinions, strategy, or views of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Cameron F. Kerry is a Visiting Scholar, MIT Media Lab, Ann R. & Andrew H. Tisch Distinguished Visiting Fellow at The Brookings Institution and Senior Counsel at Sidley Austin LLP.