Basi-20, 25 June 2008

Your mobile phone tracks your movement for others to see!

THE LATEST MOBILE PHONE TRACKING STUDIES
Do you know how far we go each day? No more than 10km! Dr. Marta Gonzalez and her team from Northeastern University in Boston, tracked 100,000 individual phone users in a European country. The data shows that we are creatures of habit, moving around certain few locations within 10km on a regular basis. The scientists also have generated a power law, which is a precise mathematical relationship, to explain most people's movements.

Traditional methods of movement search, such as GPS (Global Positioning System) and surveys, were too expensive for the team, so mobile phones become their innovative alternatives for reconstructing human movement. Whenever a participant made or received a call or text message, the location of the mobile base station relaying the data was recorded.

CONSTRUCTIVE OR INTRUSIVE: OUR RIGHT TO
The comprehensiveness and reliability of the mobile phone study has caught the attention of professionals from medical doctors, who have expressed interest in the study that could facilitate their prevention of plagues by tracking the spread of a disease; to traffic planners, who likewise could use the study to forecast traffic. In the future, your mobile phone could even report the air quality or help you pick the best route to your destination.

There is no news at all in employing the mobile phone to track human movement. Nowadays, the device is used to identify the movements of criminal suspects, construct a real-time model of traffic etc. CAUTION! Even parents are now able to track their children using signals from mobile phones. As the technique develops, parents could even read movement patterns, thereby figuring out hang-out spots.

In the experiment, the scientists are not allowed to disclose the information collected without approval to protect the anonymity of the participants. Further concrete measures also have been taken; for instance, individual phone numbers were disguised as 26-digit security codes.

Nevertheless the data available from our mobile phones could just prove too rich a minefield to ignore, and THAT does puts our right to privacy at risk!

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Please also read... Text Talk - Do You? Or Should You? SylviaW-17 on "Texting is not Connecting" WARNING: PC CYBER CRIME attacking MOBILE PHONES!