README.org

Countries with (C/X)DR studies

Leo Ferres (& others) UDD & Telefónica I+D lferres@udd.cl

Introduction

People have been asking me why CDR investigations are only carried out in “third world” countries like Chile (??!!), there’s even a bit of a more formal (but limited) study coming to the same conclusions. After seeing much work in the area and knowning this wasn’t right, I asked this twitter question, and took the Netmob 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017 booklets of abstracts that can be found here and ran the following code on them:

Processing

#!/bin/bash
echoerr() { echo "$@" 1>&2; }
while read line; do
echoerr $line
echo $line
pdfgrep --color=always --cache -n -i "$line" netmob_abstracts_*.pdf
done < listofcountries.txt

I only worked with the oral presentation booklets (not posters or the D4D challenge). This produced

wc -l bib/countriesfound.txt

66135 bib/countriesfound.txt

using a listofcountries.txt file that I found on the internet. Many of these lines are false positives though, either because of mismatches “Mali” -> “Nor*mali*zed” or other similar effects. I then spent some time checking out the files by hand, and recording the ones that were effectively a mention of a specific country’s CDR dataset.

Results

The following table is simply an “existence” table, I’m not exhaustive, but rather would like to show which countries have been studied using these methods at least once.

Continent	Country	Page	Subscribers	Length (mo)	Year	Contributor
Europe	Andorra	105	1264292	1	2017	NetMob
America (South)	Argentina	104	40000000?	5	2013	NetMob
Europe	Austria	55	?	?	2013	NetMob
Europe	Belgium	source	2500000	6	2009	@leoferres
America (South)	Brazil	46	?	0.6	2013	NetMob
America (South)	Chile	126	142988	0.5	2017	NetMob
Asia (East)	China	85	?	6	2017	NetMob
Europe	Estonia	87	48871	0.3	2015	NetMob
Europe	France	source	48500000	5 (2007)	2018	@Metti_Hoof
Europe	Portugal	72	?	6	2013	NetMob
Europe	Spain	72	?	6	2013	NetMob
America (Central)	Haiti	74	2900000	2	2015	NetMob
Asia (South)	India	109	4000000	3	2015	NetMob
Europe	Ireland	57	500000	?	2011	NetMob
Europe	Italy	56	?	10	2010	NetMob
America (Central)	Mexico	42	1000000s	6	2015	NetMob
Africa	Namibia	117	4500000	50	2017	NetMob
Africa	Senegal	117	9500000	12	2017	NetMob
Asia	Nepal	58	12900000	?	2017	NetMob
Europe	Netherlands	103	?	36	2011	NetMob
Europe	Norway	145	509	?	2013	NetMob
Africa	Rwanda	source	400000/1500000	56	2015	@deaneckles
Europe	Slovenia	173	5000	1	2013	NetMob
Asia	Sri Lanka	75	?	?	2017	NetMob
Europe	Switzerland	118	38	10	2013	NetMob
Africa	Tanzania	146	415000	4	2017	NetMob
America (North)	United States	47	475000	2	2011	NetMob
Asia	Bangladesh	source	5100000	3	2016	@arutherfordium
Europe?	England	source	65000000	1	2010	@arutherfordium
Asia	Pakistan	source	39000000	7	2015	@arutherfordium
Asia	Turkey	source	3500000	?	2017	@arutherfordium
Europe	Switzerland	source	2700000	12	2019	@ProfDiegoPuga
America (South)	Colombia	source	7000000	6	2018	@danielapaolotti
Africa	Cote D’Ivoire	source	5000000	5	2012	@lbravoc

Conclusions

These are some general conclusions I glean from the table above. They are, alas, not scientific at this point, but anecdotal and would be happy to discuss them. In fact, someone should do a much more in-depth/serious study and let the community know. For now, this should suffice for me so I can just redirect some types of questions I get to this website.

1. There’s not really a preference for non-European/developing countries, at least not in this “there is (at least one) dataset for country X” review table,
2. the above being said, it does seem that CDR work prioritizes certain countries (Haiti, as the foremost example), but they also seem to do so for humanitarian reasons, instead of less-strict privacy laws (people will do whatever they can to help, including giving out otherwise sensitive information… these are not leaks),
3. most of these studies analyze mobile data from their own contries rather than taking data from other countries, except maybe the D4R Challenge and Haiti datasets, which were designed for external help.

Notes

1. This is just one conference (albeit the most prominent one, NetMob) and still, not all papers have been included, meaning I’m completely sure that there area many, many other countries/regions that have been studies using C/XDR datasets. [ NB: As more submissions trickle in, I will have to add other sources. ]
2. Sometimes, there may be little information about a dataset in a given country, but then it has been studied further in some other paper. I have recorded the page and edition of NetMob with the most information.
3. There might also be some points where I’ve missed a piece of information, or even a better dataset from the same region. This should not impact strongly (or logically negatively) on the fact that there exists a dataset for that region.
4. This is of course, and by necessity, quick and dirty. Anyone can ask me for pull requests, it’d be fantastic to have a rather complete list of datasets that have been published. I might come back to this running a more exhaustive search in the Netmob pages, or I might not, but one thing that could be done is search for all instances of the word “data” and see if there are other countries that were not picked up by the countries’ restrictive regular expressions (or more likely cities as well).

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the following people for their Twitter replies: Esteban Moro, Martha Gonzalez, Jari Saramaki, Nuria Oliver, Erki Saluveer, Yves-Alexander de Montjoye, Alex Rutherford.

Hope it’s useful.