Advancements in AI might soon render phrases such as "hidden in the crowd" or "stay hidden in plain sight" a curious relic of the past, according to new research published last week on Nature Communications. In a paper titled "Interaction data are identifiable even across long periods of time," researchers used geometric deep learning and triplet loss optimization to successfully identify a majority of individuals from an anonymized mobile phone dataset of 40,000 people. The research is notable because fine-grained records of people's interactions, both offline and online, are collected at scale today. Tech giants such as Facebook and Google, telecommunication operators, and other businesses are known to collect and either resell data wholesale or leverage it to power data-centric services. The technique relies on how people tend to stick to established social circles and that such regular interactions form a stable pattern over time.

How you interact with a crowd may help you stick out from it, at least to artificial intelligence. When fed information about a target individual's mobile phone interactions, as well as their contacts' interactions, AI can correctly pick the target out of more than 40,000 anonymous mobile phone service subscribers more than half the time, researchers report January 25 in Nature Communications. The findings suggest humans socialize in ways that could be used to pick them out of datasets that are supposedly anonymized. It's no surprise that people tend to remain within established social circles and that these regular interactions form a stable pattern over time, says Jaideep Srivastava, a computer scientist from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who was not involved in the study. "But the fact that you can use that pattern to identify the individual, that part is surprising."

Due to their unique oversight, governments have a surplus of data at their fingertips. Used properly, this available data could enable them to create beneficial programs that tackle problems in economics, policy, transportation, and civic life. Unfortunately, the majority of that data is untapped. Here are the facts about AI startups needing data, and how that helps governments. All hope is not lost, though.