Cell Phones Predict the Future

An anonymous reader writes "Wired News reports that cell phones were used in a recent project at MIT to both document and predict the lives of 100 MIT faculty and staff members. During the Reality Mining Project at MIT, Researcher Nathan Eagle logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers through cell phones carried by the participants. From the article, "Given enough data, Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people -- especially professors and Media Lab employees -- would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time."

Comments

Re:I predict that data thieves will love this!

[HTH NE1]

"We want to have our life choreographed, cataloged, witnessed and archived," Stakutis said. "Now we are heading to a world where this is possible without effort."

Indeed, next comes the government contract to expand and fully exploit this information. Soon, local law enforcement will be using this data to do their jobs more efficiently and stopping people for questioning just because they've "strayed from the herd".

And they'll do it without directly violating your privacy because they won't see the data that was the basis of the alert. As long as no one but the black box doing the mining sees your private information and doesn't disclose any of it with its findings, it's not going to be seen as a violation of your privacy. Privacy violations will become defined as disclosure of one person's information to another person, and machines running automated processes will be exempt by definition.