Researchers have found that GPS technology is not necessary to show where a driver travelled -- a starting point and the driver's speed data are enough.
"We have shown that speed data and a starting point are all we need to roughly identify where you have driven," said Janne Lindqvist, an assistant professor at Rutgers State University of New Jersey in the US.
The researchers developed a technique, dubbed "elastic pathing", to predict pathways by seeing how speed patterns match street layouts.
By repeatedly matching speed patterns with the most likely road patterns, the route and destination can be approximated, the findings showed.
To test how well the elastic pathing technique worked, Lindqvist and his colleagues examined data from six drivers in New Jersey travelling to 46 different destinations over 240 trips, and from 21 drivers in Seattle in over 691 trips.
For more than 20 percent of the trips, the technique predicted the final destination within a little less than one-third of a mile from the actual endpoint.
The findings will be presented at the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2014) Sep 13-17 in Seattle, US.