TimmyHMobile Phone Tracking Study Shows We’re Creatures of Habit
June 11th 2008 06:54
A European study released last week which tracked more than 100,000 mobile phones has shown that humans are incredibly predictable. The results found that at any given time people can be found in one a just a few locations, generally not far from their homes. Un-surprisingly people exhibit a great deal of regularity, travelling to and from work and two or three other places and spending more than 90% of their time in less than five.
This might initially seem obvious. But researchers are convinced that people exhibit similar patterns of movement regardless of whether they are travelling short or long distances. They believe the study could have implications for urban planning and potentially disease and genetic tracking.
Scientists have had difficulties in tracking something as ephemeral as movement. Researchers say that if general rules and algorithms of people’s movement could be written, they could be used to create computer models for understanding emergency response, urban planning and the spread of disease.
Albert-László Barabási, the study’s author and director of the Center of Complex Network Research in Boston says “Slices of our behavior are preserved in these electronic data sets. This is creating huge opportunities for science.”
Anonymity is ensured by scrambling individual data. But researchers say the study is so conclusive that “we can obtain the likelihood of finding a user in any location.”
The 100,000 phones that were tracked were chosen at random set of six million and were watched for a period of six months. The data included two sets of data: the location of a phone when a user sent or received a text message or phone call, and a two hourly measure of 206 users. The two were surprisingly similar, which assisted researchers in their conclusions.
The researchers found that the new paper moved the field of human tracking analysis forward significantly because people hold on to their phones. The movement of individuals is more closely tracked by mobiles than it can be with paper currency or other methods have that been used previously.
Founder of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, Marc Rotenberg, has raised concerns regarding the privacy of individuals in the study. He said that he found the research a “troubling study…which raises questions about the protection of privacy in physical spaces, when devices make possible the capture of locational data.”
There are serious ethical issues as well, said the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Caplan. As the director of the Center for Bioethics there he says researchers are generally free to observe people in public places without getting permission from them. But Mr Caplan questions whether it is ethical for a person’s mobile phone to be subject to such interrogation without their permission. “Your cellphone is not something I would consider a public entity” he says.
This might initially seem obvious. But researchers are convinced that people exhibit similar patterns of movement regardless of whether they are travelling short or long distances. They believe the study could have implications for urban planning and potentially disease and genetic tracking.
Scientists have had difficulties in tracking something as ephemeral as movement. Researchers say that if general rules and algorithms of people’s movement could be written, they could be used to create computer models for understanding emergency response, urban planning and the spread of disease.
Albert-László Barabási, the study’s author and director of the Center of Complex Network Research in Boston says “Slices of our behavior are preserved in these electronic data sets. This is creating huge opportunities for science.”
Anonymity is ensured by scrambling individual data. But researchers say the study is so conclusive that “we can obtain the likelihood of finding a user in any location.”
The 100,000 phones that were tracked were chosen at random set of six million and were watched for a period of six months. The data included two sets of data: the location of a phone when a user sent or received a text message or phone call, and a two hourly measure of 206 users. The two were surprisingly similar, which assisted researchers in their conclusions.
The researchers found that the new paper moved the field of human tracking analysis forward significantly because people hold on to their phones. The movement of individuals is more closely tracked by mobiles than it can be with paper currency or other methods have that been used previously.
Founder of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, Marc Rotenberg, has raised concerns regarding the privacy of individuals in the study. He said that he found the research a “troubling study…which raises questions about the protection of privacy in physical spaces, when devices make possible the capture of locational data.”
There are serious ethical issues as well, said the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Caplan. As the director of the Center for Bioethics there he says researchers are generally free to observe people in public places without getting permission from them. But Mr Caplan questions whether it is ethical for a person’s mobile phone to be subject to such interrogation without their permission. “Your cellphone is not something I would consider a public entity” he says.
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