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  • NEWS FEATURE

Can tracking people through phone-call data improve lives?

Researchers have analysed anonymized phone records of tens of millions of people in low-income countries. Critics question whether the benefits outweigh the risks.
  1. Amy Maxmen
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Haitian try to salvage any valuables in the rubble after an earthquake.

Haitians scrambled to save possessions in 2010 after an earthquake destroyed parts of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Credit: Moises Saman/Magnum

After an earthquake tore through Haiti in 2010, killing more than 100,000 people, aid agencies spread across the country to work out where the survivors had fled. But Linus Bengtsson, a graduate student studying global health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, thought he could answer the question from afar. Many Haitians would be using their mobile phones, he reasoned, and those calls would pass through phone towers, which could allow researchers to approximate people’s locations. Bengtsson persuaded Digicel, the biggest phone company in Haiti, to share data from millions of call records from before and after the quake. Digicel replaced the names and phone numbers of callers with random numbers to protect their privacy.

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Nature 569, 614-617 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01679-5

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