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The Metaphor To feed our hunger for location data, we must trim the personally identifying bits, without removing the informational meat. That's not as easy as it sounds because removing the people's names is not sufficient; it's easy to identify people from location data which shows them going into their homes and workplaces.  To return to the metaphor, the informational meat is marbled with veins of personally identifiable information. Amazingly, a computer-controlled cutting machine relying on detailed anatomical maps can excise the veins of personally identifiable information, without destroying the meat.	The Nuts and Bolts A key step towards efficiently anonymizing the GPS track of a person's movements involves selectively blurring that person's location only when she person leaves the public space (as identified by detailed maps). This selective blurring makes it much harder to identify each person, but it doesn't eviscerate the data. This blurring can be achieved in real time, without the need for user input because the maps indicate which areas are public, e.g. major roads, parks, shopping centers.
	A GoogleEarth snapshot shows an individual's specific path on the public street, but the individual's locations within the residential neighborhood are automatically represented by the single point in the center. Blurring the location within the more private, residential neighborhood helps anonymize the track.
Applications: Rich, demographically-keyed data on human movements -- Being able to anonymize a person's GPS track makes it possible to obtain her opt-in consent and to use individual GPS tracks as data. A collection of such tracks would provide rich and easy-to-analyze data for retail site selection, transportation planning, mobile advertising, etc. Learn more about how this method can generate awesome data. Privacy control as a service within location sharing (friend-finding) apps --  People "appear more comfortable sharing their presence at locations visited by a large and diverse set of people." So, using maps to automatically identify such locations would make it possible to give users an option that incorporates a certain social intelligence -- "show my exact location when I am in public. Otherwise, be a little vague." There is strong reason to believe that the availability of this option will lead to more location-sharing. Learn more about how this method can improve Location Sharing Apps.