( CNN ) -- Can you be identified only by where you take your phone ? Yes , according to a new study , which finds it 's not very hard at all . While most of us are free to go wherever we want , our daily and weekly movement patterns are pretty predictable . We go to work , to school , to church , to our neighborhood gym , grocery store or coffee shop , and we come home -- all quietly tracked by the GPS in our phone . And with nothing more than this anonymous location data , someone who wanted to badly enough could easily figure out who you are by tracking your smartphone . Patterns of our movements , when traced on a map , create something akin to a fingerprint that is unique to every person . Those are the findings of a report by researchers from MIT and elsewhere , published this week in the journal Scientific Reports . They say that , throughout history , people have always yearned for some degree of privacy , and there have always been others who wanted to keep an eye on them . With modern technology , they say , tracking people is easier than ever . `` Modern information technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones , however , magnify the uniqueness of individuals , further enhancing the traditional challenges to privacy , '' they wrote . `` Mobility data is among the most sensitive data currently being collected . Mobility data contains the approximate whereabouts of individuals and can be used to reconstruct individuals ' movements across space and time . '' The growing push to track your location indoors . For the study , the research team studied 15 months of anonymous mobile data for roughly 1.5 million people . What they found was that , if they got accurate hourly updates on a person 's whereabouts , tracked by their mobile carrier 's cell towers , four `` data points '' were all they needed to figure out the person 's identity 95 % of the time . That 's the sort of thing that has privacy advocates , like the Electronic Frontier Foundation , worried . In a wrap-up of last year 's developments in mobile privacy , the group 's Hanni Fakhoury and Marcia Hofmann noted that , in multiple cases , law enforcement has approached wireless carriers for mobile data to track users . At least one court has ruled that users have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their cell phone data . `` ( T ) he government claims that cell phone users give up their privacy rights because they have voluntarily disclosed their physical location to the cell phone providers every time a phone connects to the provider 's cell tower , '' EFF said in a statement related to an October court case . `` ... However , this theory undermines privacy in nearly any networked communication . '' Increasingly , the makers of mobile operating systems are opening up anonymous location data to developers designing apps that do things like target local advertising to the users . Apple , for example , states in its privacy policy that it can share anonymous mobile data with `` partners and licensees . '' The study 's authors said keeping data anonymous is not necessarily enough to ensure real privacy . `` A simply anonymized dataset does not contain name , home address , phone number or other obvious identifier , '' they wrote . `` Yet , if individual 's patterns are unique enough , outside information can be used to link the data back to an individual . '' So , for example , say that you wake up at home every morning , head to the office five days a week , then hit the gym on three of those days . That 's three data points already . Then maybe you go to the same church , or restaurant for brunch , every Sunday . There 's the fourth -- plenty to figure out who you are , the authors say . Every additional location you hit regularly just makes it that much easier . Like EFF , the study 's authors said that has troubling implications . `` These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual 's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals , '' they wrote .
Report : It 's easy to identify smartphone users by their movements . Researchers from MIT and elsewhere tracked 1.5 million people for 15 months . Each mobile user 's daily movements are unique and create a `` fingerprint '' Privacy advocates worry how law enforcement and others may use that data .