Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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."
Do we? It's one thing to have a personal diary or blog that you opt-in to submit information to daily. Hell, I have even expanded on my mobile pics to include a "blog" of what I did during any particular day... That's my *choice* to put that information out there for people to see. It's not mandated by my cell phone to take pictures of what I'm doing and throw them into a database that I have no control over.
While Eagle "acknowledges that the project raises some important questions about privacy and about the ownership of data, and says people should feel empowered, not scared, by his cell-phone applications," I just can't get passed his statement earlier in the article:
The Media Lab behavior is beautifully regular, but the lab lives and dies by sponsors' meetings," Eagle said. "So the weeks leading up to sponsors' meetings, people are pulling all-nighters and people are going crazy trying to get their demo working.
Is this another demo for one of your sponsors that might end up buying the rights of this technology from you and then creating their own spyware network of their mobile users' daily habits? Tracking when, where, and how they communicate to "better" serve them with advertisements and the selling/stealing of their data to other institutions and data thieves?
He has already founded a company called MetroSpark that in September will launch a Bluetooth-powered social-introduction service.
After filling out a personal profile, MetroSpark will attempt to be a gracious, ubiquitous host that connects people with common interests, whether they are technology conference goers who share an interest in motorcycles or barhopping singles who love long walks on the beach at sunset.
Oh, so you started this company -- got it advertised on Wired and now Slashdot -- and it's never going to get bought out by someone else (i.e. Dodgeball) and they aren't going to use this huge database of customer data that was originally meant to be benign?
I predict that even more corporations are going to have a field day with this data than what they originally intended (i.e. when/where you have your cell phone on and how many days a week you are sitting at home letting the CATV wash over you). If the corporations (and then obviously the government) can track social networks and trends via software on the phones you can bet your ass they are going to include it "free of charge" while still restricting your "free" access to any other programs you might want to run.
I predict that people will fall for this invasion just like any other. We're seriously one step closer to the "Big Brother" that everyone used to fear... Now we are welcoming him with open arms!
Hmm, not entirely the same thing, but I'd worked on a project called ScheduleNanny, where we used people's PDAs coupled with GPSes to predict where they will be.
There were some interesting emergent behaviors - for instance, the system would know that I have to go to the bank later in the day and I would drive by the bank in the morning, so it would indicate that I could save time by going to the bank then. Or for instance, it would beep in the morning that it was time for me to go shower or go to the train station.
Details can be found here.
All in all, it was pretty good - after some amount of initial bootload information, you can take away the GPS and quite accurately predict where people are likely to be. This looks fairly similar, in some ways.
I think it's great that someone's working on this technology, and there's no reason to assume that it's going to be used for some nefarious purpose. The horrible thing about "Big Brother" wasn't that he knows what you're doing, it's that he stops you from doing what you want to do. All this privacy nonsense really has to stop. It really doesn't matter who knows what you're doing, and chances are a lot of people know a lot about you just by looking. I don't think it has any negative impact on my life if people know what I'm doing as long as I can still do whatever I want. Of course, dishonest people might think otherwise. Of course a criminal would want some privacy, or someone who is lying to his wife. But otherwise I can't think of a good reason for it.
Why do my serious comments get modded "funny"?
You could predict that for 10 hours a day, i'm sitting right here in this chair.
And that from 6 PM until about 6:30 PM, I'm driving home, and that from then on I'd be at my home, watching TV or fucking around on the intertron.
You'd be right about 85% of the time. No wonder this works better for grad students and professors, adults with responsibilities typically have schedules.
All they do is piss away money there, dont they? Well piss a little my way, will ya?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I can predict that the next time I weigh myself the scale will read between 160 and 170. This prediction would have been true far more than 85% of the time over the last five years and I will be very surprised if it is not true the next time I weigh myself.
Once I learn that someone works a full-time job and where they work, I can predict with greater than 85% accuracy where they will be between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Monday through Friday.
I've heard it said, whether or not correctly I do not know, that if you simply predict that tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's, you will be accurate more often than the weather service.
Predictions are only valuable when they are unlikely or surprising. Tabulating obvious patterns and predicting their continuation may be highly accurate yet low in value.
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Given 10,000 hours of data on where I am, of course you can spot a pattern...... Let's see, it's monday, I bet he's in class. It's friday, and he was out till 4:00am at an establishment that serves alchol - I bet he is over sleeping his 7:30am lecture on Chemistry. The interesting findings would have been the lack of ability to predict acurately what people were doing. It's especially easy to do this on a college campus where there aren't a lot of dual uses for things (there aren't a lot of reasons to go into the hall of chemistry vs say going into 101 America Tower in Downtown America's Ville).
The value in being able to predict the future is in being able to see unexpected events. It's very easy to say "I'll be at work next tuesday " and impossible to say "I'm going to win the lottery next monday, so I'll quit now".
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I've done this on games I've written.. notably in the days of text-based MUDs I had an oracle that'd track user behavior and predict what they'd do in the future both as individuals and as a group. It was kind of fun and reasonably accurate. I'm still waiting to see this feature in EverQuest or some other big MMORPG.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.