Privacy and False Identification Risk in Geomasking Techniques

Recent years have seen an increase in location privacy research, including the application of geomasking procedures. Geographical masks aim to protect privacy and preserve spatial information through the displacement of point data. False identification, or the mistaken association of data with the incorrect person or household, is an unexplored issue in geomasking, despite legal protections against false association. This study introduces a topological framework for assessing identification risk and examines the risk of false identification in four masking techniques: random perturbation, donut masking, and the newer Voronoi and MGRS masking techniques. While Voronoi masking is found to best preserve the clustering properties of a sample of urban foreclosure data, the other three masking techniques result in better protection against correct and false identification.     

Ancient Microbial DNA in Dental Calculus: A New method for Studying Rapid Human Migration Events

Ancient human migrations provide the critical genetic background to historical and contemporary human demographic patterns. However, our ability to infer past human migration events, especially those that occurred over rapid timescales, is often limited. A key example is the peopling of Polynesia, where the timing is relatively well defined, but the exact routes taken during the final stages and the source populations are not. Here, we discuss the technical limitations of current methods for inferring rapid human migration events, using the final stages of Polynesian migration as an example. We also introduce a promising new proxy method to infer human migrations—patterns of bacterial evolution within ancient dental calculus (calcified plaque). While we focus on Polynesia, this method should be applicable to other past migrations, enhancing our understanding of human prehistory and revealing the crucial events that shaped it.