Accepted dog tags?

A recent research published on this week’s Nature magazine revealed that:

[...]most people, perhaps unsurprisingly, are creatures of habit. They make regular trips to the same few destinations such as work and home, and pepper these with occasional longer forays such as vacations.

The distances people covered varied widely between individuals, but follow a similar pattern — most people move on average a short distance on a daily basis, whereas a few hardy souls move long distances in a short time.

How did they get such information? By tracking people’s mobile phones of course! Sound creepy? They don’t think so:

These patterns might sound obvious, but as data on individual human movements are difficult to come by, researchers haven’t been able to study them precisely. “We don’t really know how humans move around,” says Barabási. “When you look at the population as a whole, there is no way of describing the patterns. The problem with answering this question is that people normally are not tracked — but today we are tracked thanks to the phones we carry with us.”

So Barabási and his colleagues teamed up with a mobile-phone company (unidentified to protect customers’ privacy), who provided them with anonymized data on which transmitter towers had handled the calls and texts for 100,000 individuals over the course of 6 months.

What happens when your data is used in such a way? Who owns it anyway? Even if it’s anonymous, isn’t there something slightly strange about being aware that something as simple as making a call can end up informing scientists and after that designers and companies about how “people” commute. Blyk actually makes you think about that process in a conscience way, it isn’t hidden from you and you know that responding to ads will influence future content. This type of “research” borders on the infringement of privacy.

3 comments June 5th, 2008