In this work, we show that sensor data may leak a sensor’s location even if the latter is not explicitly included in the data set. The sensors are localized by linking sensor data, in particular activity data, with publicly available environmental data such as weather data. We show that using a linkage attack a cow can be localized within an entire country with an average accuracy of up to 32.6 km solely from activity traces recorded with a tracker in the cow’s stomach.

F. Papst, N. Stricker, O. Saukh, Localization from activity sensor data: poster abstract, in: SenSys ’20: Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (2020) 703–704