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openaire: EC/H2020/654024/EU//SoBigData The exponential increase in the availability of large-scale mobility data has fueled the vision of smart cities that will transform our lives. The truth is that we have just scratched the surface of the research challenges that should be tackled in order to make this vision a reality. Consequently, there is an increasing interest among different research communities (ranging from civil engineering to computer science) and industrial stakeholders in building knowledge discovery pipelines over such data sources. At the same time, this widespread data availability also raises privacy issues that must be considered by both industrial and academic stakeholders. In this paper, we provide a wide perspective on the role that big data have in reshaping cities. The paper covers the main aspects of urban data analytics, focusing on privacy issues, algorithms, applications and services, and georeferenced data from social media. In discussing these aspects, we leverage, as concrete examples and case studies of urban data science tools, the results obtained in the “City of Citizens” thematic area of the Horizon 2020 SoBigData initiative, which includes a virtual research environment with mobility datasets and urban analytics methods developed by several institutions around Europe. We conclude the paper outlining the main research challenges that urban data science has yet to address in order to help make the smart city vision a reality.

Recently, big data had become central in the analysis of human behavior and the development of innovative services. In particular, a new class of services is emerging, taking advantage of different sources of data, in order to consider the multiple aspects of human beings. Unfortunately, these data can lead to re-identification problems and other privacy leaks, as diffusely reported in both scientific literature and media. The risk is even more pressing if multiple sources of data are linked together since a potential adversary could know information related to each dataset. For this reason, it is necessary to evaluate accurately and mitigate the individual privacy risk before releasing personal data. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the first task, i.e., assessing privacy risk, in a multidimensional scenario, defining some possible privacy attacks and simulating them using real-world datasets.

During the last 35 years, data management principles such as physical and logical independence, declarative querying and cost-based optimization have led to profound pervasiveness of relational databases in any kind of organization. More importantly, these technical advances have enabled the first round of business intelligence applications and laid the foundation for managing and analyzing Big Data today.

Privacy is an ever-growing concern in our society and is becoming a fundamental aspect to take into account when one wants to use, publish and analyze data involving human personal sensitive information, like data referring to individual mobility. Unfortunately, it is increasingly hard to transform the data in a way that it protects sensitive information: we live in the era of big data characterized by unprecedented opportunities to sense, store and analyze social data describing human activities in great detail and resolution. This is especially true when we work on mobility data, that are characterized by the fact that there is no longer a clear distinction between quasi-identifiers and sensitive attributes. Therefore, protecting privacy in this context is a significant challenge. As a result, privacy preservation simply cannot be accomplished by de-identification alone. In this chapter, we propose the Privacy by Design paradigm to develop technological frameworks for countering the threats of undesirable, unlawful effects of privacy violation, without obstructing the knowledge discovery opportunities of social mining and big data analytical technologies. Our main idea is to inscribe privacy protection into the knowledge discovery technology by design, so that the analysis incorporates the relevant privacy requirements from the start. We show three applications of the Privacy by Design principle on mobility data analytics. First we present a framework based on a data-driven spatial generalization, which is suitable for the privacy-aware publication of movement data in order to enable clustering analysis. Second, we present a method for sanitizing semantic trajectories, using a generalization of visited places based on a taxonomy of locations. The private data then may be used for extracting frequent sequential patterns. Lastly, we show how to apply the idea of Privacy by Design in a distributed setting in which movement data from individual vehicles is made private through differential privacy manipulations and then is collected, aggregated and analyzed by a centralized station.

Privacy is ever-growing concern in our society and is becoming a fundamental aspect to take into account when one wants to use, publish and analyze data involving human personal sensitive information. Unfortunately, it is increasingly hard to transform the data in a way that it protects sensitive information: we live in the era of big data characterized by unprecedented opportunities to sense, store and analyze social data describing human activities in great detail and resolution. As a result, privacy preservation simply cannot be accomplished by de-identification alone. In this paper, we propose the privacy-by-design paradigm to develop technological frameworks for countering the threats of undesirable, unlawful effects of privacy violation, without obstructing the knowledge discovery opportunities of social mining and big data analytical technologies. Our main idea is to inscribe privacy protection into the knowledge discovery technology by design, so that the analysis incorporates the relevant privacy requirements from the start.

This paper presents a framework for research infrastructures enabling ethically sensitive and legally compliant data science in Europe. Our goal is to describe how to design and implement an open platform for big data social science, including, in particular, personal data. To this end, we discuss a number of infrastructural, organizational and methodological principles to be developed for a concrete implementation. These include not only systematically tools and methodologies that effectively enable both the empirical evaluation of the privacy risk and data transformations by using privacy-preserving approaches, but also the development of training materials (a massive open online course) and organizational instruments based on legal and ethical principles. This paper provides, by way of example, the implementation that was adopted within the context of the SoBigData Research Infrastructure.