Estimating Population Density Without Contravening Citizen’s Privacy: Warsaw Use Case

Spatial data on a cellular network load can be used to develop commercial and public services. However, such data is calculated based on individual users’ behavior and can contravene their privacy rights. Moreover, direct tracking of individual devices violates the European Union’s regulations. To solve this issue, we propose to use data aggregated in individual cells of the public land mobile network without tracking an individual mobile device in the entire process. To prove that the proposed data collection method is useful, we compared the obtained results with a closed-circuit television system in an estimation of the number of people. The proposed system is sensitive enough to detect untypical global events in an urban area and distinguish transport demand zones of various types as we showed on real data from the City of Warsaw.