A review on smartphone usage data for user identification and user profiling

Abstract

The amount of retrievable smartphone data is escalating; while some apps on the smartphone are evidently exploiting and leaking users’ data. These phenomena potentially violate privacy and personal data protection laws as various studies have showed that technologies such as artificial intelligence could transform smartphone data into personal data by generating user identification and user profiling. User identification identifies specific users among the data based upon the users’ characteristics and users profiling generates users’ traits (e.g. age and personality) by exploring how data is correlated with personal information. Nevertheless, the comprehensive review papers discussing both of the topics are limited. This paper thus aims to provide a comprehensive review of user identification and user profiling using smartphone data. Compared to the existing review papers, this paper has a broader lens by reviewing the general applications of smartphone data before focusing on smartphone usage data. This paper also discusses some possible data sources that can be used in this research topic.

Keywords

• smartphone usage data
• privacy
• user identification
• user profiling