Predicting Sociodemographic Attributes from Mobile Usage Patterns: Applications and Privacy Implications

Abstract

When users interact with their mobile devices, they leave behind unique digital footprints that can be viewed as predictive proxies that reveal an array of users' characteristics, including their demographics. Predicting users' demographics based on mobile usage can provide significant benefits for service providers and users, including improving customer targeting, service personalization, and market research efforts. This study uses machine learning algorithms and mobile usage data from 235 demographically diverse users to examine the accuracy of predicting their sociodemographic attributes (age, gender, income, and education) from mobile usage metadata, filling the gap in the current literature by quantifying the predictive power of each attribute and discussing the practical applications and privacy implications. According to the results, gender can be most accurately predicted (balanced accuracy = 0.862) from mobile usage footprints, whereas predicting users' education level is more challenging (balanced accuracy = 0.719). Moreover, the classification models were able to classify users based on whether their age or income was above or below a certain threshold with acceptable accuracy. The study also presents the practical applications of inferring demographic attributes from mobile usage data and discusses the implications of the findings, such as privacy and discrimination risks, from the perspectives of different stakeholders.

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