Methods and systems for anonymously tracking and/or analysing movement of mobile communication devices connected to a mobile network or cellular network

A surveillance system for mobile communication devices comprising:

• one or more processors;
• an anonymization module configured to, by the one or more processors:
• receive, for each one of a multitude of individual objects, each being a mobile communication device, in a population of individual objects, identifying information representative of an identity of the individual object, wherein the identifying information representative of the identity of the individual object includes and/or is based on mobile identifying information including at least one of mobile phone number, mobile subscriber identity and mobile equipment identity, and to generate anonymous identifier skew measures based on identifying information of one or more individual objects, wherein said anonymization module is configured to, by the one or more processors:
• perform anonymization into an anonymous identifier skew measure effectively online, that is in real-time and/or near real-time, immediately deleting the identifying information after processing;
• a memory configured to store at least one anonymous identifier skew measure based on at least one of the generated identifier skew measures;
• an estimator configured to, by the one or more processors:
• receive, from said memory and/or directly from said anonymization module, a number of anonymous identifier skew measures, at least one identifier skew measure for each of at least two tempo-spatial locations of individual objects, and
• wherein said estimator is configured to, by the one or more processors:
• generate one or more population flow measures related to individual objects passing from one tempo-spatial location to another tempo-spatial location based on the received anonymous identifier skew measures.

A surveillance system for mobile communication devices, said surveillance system comprising a system for anonymously tracking and/or analyzing flow or movement of individual objects, being mobile communication devices, between tempo-spatial locations,

• wherein the system is configured to determine, for each individual object in a population of multiple individual objects, an anonymized identifier using information representative of an identity of the individual object, wherein the identifying information representative of the identity of the individual object includes and/or is based on mobile identifying information of a mobile communication device connected to a mobile network and/or cellular network, as input, wherein anonymization into an anonymous identifier skew measure takes place effectively online, that is in real-time and/or near real-time, immediately deleting the identifying information after processing,
• wherein each anonymized identifier corresponds to any individual object in a group of individual objects, the identity information of which results in the same anonymized identifier with probabilities such that no individual object generates the anonymized identifier with greater probability than the sum of the probabilities of generating the identifier over all other individual objects,
• wherein the system is configured to keep track of skew measures, one skew measure for each of two or more tempo-spatial locations, wherein each skew measure is generated based on anonymized identifiers associated with the corresponding individual objects associated with a specific corresponding tempo-spatial location;
• and
• wherein the system is configured to determine at least one population flow measure representative of the number of individual objects passing from a first tempo-spatial location to a second tempo-spatial location based on the skew measures corresponding to the tempo-spatial locations.