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Cell Phones Tracking Nightlife Activity
Roland Piquepaille writes "A Columbia University computer science professor has co-founded a New York-based company named Sense Networks to sell tracking software to other companies. It is also distributing a free version of this software, named Citysense, which shows on your cell phone where the wild things are happening in your own town. Citysense 'uses advanced machine learning techniques to number crunch vast amounts of data emanating from thousands of cell-phones, GPS-equipped cabs and other data devices to paint live pictures of where people are gathering.' Citysense is available today in San Francisco, before being soon deployed in Chicago and five other U.S. cities."
...have been selling devices for years that match up males and females. You program your device for male/single/gay or whatever and when a compatible person is nearby in notifies you. Don't know how they notify- maybe a smoke detector alarm.
therefore this application is absolutely useless to me.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Nerds not invited ;)
More seriously, it appears that this technology is GPS-only and not all folks have GPS-equipped phones. I don't understand GPS all that well and I'm wondering how this tracking software can locate them, do they have to consent to being tracked, etc. This also has some scary big-brother implications if it were to move past GPS and into standard triangulation of ALL cell phones -- with or without the user's consent(well, kinda -- what percent of average Joe users actually read their EULA/cell contract/etc.), to be used for marketing purposes(or worse).
now I'll know quickly which places to avoid.
oO0Oo
I, for one, welcome our new Citysense-equipped computer-science-professor-overlord. Where shall I hang out tonight, O Omniscient One?
There's a technology that doesn't sound like it could be misused by local or federal government. Freedom of assembly isn't really being infringed if Big bro just sends nice officers to "investigate suspicious activity", right? For everyone's safety, of course. Could be a fire hazard. Or underaged drinking.
Shows the hot spots of where lots of people hang out, thus a terrorist could figure out their next target quickly...
It's time to get passive pagers as a fallback.
"Flash crowd."
Larry Niven, 1973. Sure, we don't have the instant travel, but this sounds like it would give much more immediate information than waiting for Jerryberry Jansen to randomly turn up at the incident with a portable TV camera.
Sean Ellis
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Having been born and raised in Las Vegas, this type of service seems quite unnecessary in this town. After all, everyone knows where "the wild things are happening" here.
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
Outside of areas with small populations, who in the demographic looking for nightlife would look for large groups of people to help determine where to go for fun? That's perhaps even dumber than determining the best movie to see based solely on the box office receipts from the weekend before.
I can already picture sketchy bar owners buying up a ton of these things, to make their spot appear "hot" even though it's dead. After all, the idiotic vodka-redbull sipping bar-hoppers instinctively gravitate to the busiest shitholes, and this "technology" exists solely to capitalize even further on their collective ignorance.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
This is the same thing electronically. If I am downtown, and a large crowd is congregating 10 blocks away and I am notified, I would be drawn to join them.
Additionally, by watching how long people stay that were drawn, it would provide hard evidence to what people really want to do, and what events could be considered "sticky" (and I do not mean sticky in a Slashdot, twisted way!).
no comment
One thing I am wondering about is where do these kinds projects get their data from?
Do they have receivers distributed across town (in which case I am fine with that) or do they tap into TelCo's information? Are they (telco's) allowed to distribute that information without my conscent? Or have I given them permission to do this when I signed up for a contract with them?
How do they decide which projects can access the location data and which ones can't?
"I know where you are! I know who else is where you are!"
"I know who you call! I know who calls you"
"Now about your text messaging -- Let's talk $$$!
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
If lots of people paid attention to where other people are and gravitated towards them, spontaneous gatherings of people could occur much like a planet would form in a young solar system.
Right?
Not everyone's idea of fun is hanging out at a club. Some people would nearly die of boredom at a nightclub. Just because someone else's idea of fun isn't your idea of fun, doesn't mean they aren't having a good time. I'm sure the folks who like hanging out at clubs would get bored at a frantic LAN FPS game (what without people to hit on/get hit on by, the pointless braindead social banter, and the lack of certain mind-altering substances), or would be scared shitless driving around a track at high speed (being so easily stimulated and all).
To be honest I don't see how anyone could enjoy themselves clubbing. It's absolutely dull (especially if you hate pop culture) and the cost:fun ratio is abysmal IMO.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm always struggling to find unpopulated, desolate areas for many of my hobbies. Being able to find an area with no people around would be very useful. The problem is that you run into the conundrum of whether to go to the non-obvious or obvious empty areas. Which one would someone looking for an empty area go to, in order to avoid others seeking the same thing?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... you'll never know.
Then the telcos decide to discontinue public pay telephones.
Meanwhile, the EU decides to make it a law that cellphones have GPS in them, "for safety reasons" of course.
Now, I read stories about big business tracking people by their cellphones.
Even without GPS, someone can track me with a fair degree of accuracy, and I'm sure someone has some rather fancy software out there that we haven't heard about yet, that can make my location within a few dozens of meters accuracy.
Add to this the fact that currently, Telcos aren't held accountable for wiretapping and other otherwise-illegal activities.
I don't know about the rest of you people, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm better of with NO phone of any kind, or to just give up and go back to a hardline phone at home with an answering machine, and screw wireless. It's not like I get many calls all month anyway.
But,but.. I don't have cell phone coverage in my mom's basement
I operate a free GPS tracking service (http://www.instamapper.com), so I know a thing or two about this topic.
This is an interesting idea, but it won't catch on for a few more years. The problem is that only a tiny fraction of cell phones (I would estimate less than 1%) are capable of GPS tracking now. Of those people who have a compatible phone, most won't bother to install the app and remember to start it whenever they go out. Typical battery life when GPS is turned on is about 8 hours. So this is not an app that can run in the background 24/7.
In the end, you will have something like 10 people in San Francisco who send data to their system. It is enough data to make sense of what's happening in the city? Not hardly.
Give it another 5-10 years, and perhaps most phones will have GPSs in them. Perhaps battery life will improve enough to make continuous GPS tracking possible. Until then, this service, and other similar services, will have little value.
At least until the phone's batteries are as dead as their owners.
Just wait till some disgruntled college student uses this system to effectively wipe out a club full of trendy young people in one or more bars. Real time knowledge of where everyone is.
How do just I stop my cellphone from "emanating" this data? I don't want a bunch of losers tracking down the hot nightlife I find and create, just because they subscribe to some website. TimeOutNY has already ruined too many places with a load of bridge & tunnel dweebs.
Maybe the cool places should all jam these "emanation".
--
make install -not war
At our keyboards, in our studies/bedrooms, right?
(Checks local time: 12:30 am, and I'm at my keyboard checking /. [sigh]).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"...it's too crowded."
This might be useful for liquor companies, taxi companies, and people who are drawn to giant crowds.
I prefer to go out to places that are less-known but more interesting.
This would be an excellent tool to assist taxi dispatch, mass transit planning, and emergency response...
If it possibly worked on normal web browsers.
What a douche thing for someone to design an interface which only reports if you have a Blackberry, Pearl, Gamma Ray, Curve, or other product which sounds like a sextoy.
Well... maybe it should work on the Rabbit, too?
It doesn't work on Firefox.
I think that if all cell phones are tracked but have no user-identifying information on them, including a law to specifically make all associations between such data and any end-user invalid, then it can have a chance of being safe.
It would allow for very useful statistical info, many uses of which don't deal with the end users, but more of service usage reports, etc. Think of Webalizer, but in this case it would be Cellalizer :D
Gotta love Niven and Flash Mobs. I'm betting one of those Google cellphone apps that really makes a splash will be form your own flash mob and assemble at specified local. You could have settings for friends/family and meeting up at church, wal-mart, or books a million at a given date/time.
The best plugins would be "find nearest location for you flash mob" and "pick profile traits of unknown people to show up and set a limit for X" (where X is hopefully less than 20.)
If you could query your local food places for their average wait time for a party of your X to be seated, that would be great as well.
You'd also want to actually tie it into something like www.crimereports.com and exclude locations where arrests or police have been called out regularly to from being considered in your party planning. (Note: this would be fine for a group of say less than 20 folks all ganging up on a given establishment for one evening in a relatively low crime rate area. It might not be good if you were planning a party for say 150-200 folks.)
I used mine to find all the happenin' scenes and it just lead me to grocery stores and the dmv.
FTFA: "Translation: if you have a Blackberry, you have instant 411 on where the cool folks are. Or, are not"
What? "Cool folks" and " where the wild things are happening in your own town."
Why would I need that service, in my own town?
I can only only images tons of cheesy spam-like messages in larger citys: "Eat at Genuine Tony's Pizza. Discount for the next 45 minutes"
In the small-town it will be things like "Garden mowever 70% discount at Wal-Mart"
No, it will probably never fulfill your wet dreams, unless it guides you to pay-for-service areas. Thinking of, that will probably be its main use... Sigh... Dump it.
cognoscenti
If a Slashdotter is moving from their computer cocoon within 72 hours of Starcraft II being released, THEN I would send in the paramedics. Clearly he has either suffered from seizures or is perhaps being kidnapped, probably by Koreans upset that he forgot to gg them after a match.
keke
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
400 posers follow citysense, turn up at an early morning mega-church meeting and discover religion does not mix well with hangovers.
Invenio via vel creo
There was an actual study of 100,000 cellphone user's geographic habits reported in slashdot three weeks ago. The data was supposed "washed of identifing information". However if I google-mapped the 3AM GPS location of cellphone holder, I probably could find out who they are. The study wasalso conducted in a foerieng country whwere privacy safeguards may not have been as strong. The results were quite pedestrian: people spend most of their time at two locations during a day - home and work.
Knowing where everyone is at all times and what they're doing? The potential for abuse by the already powerful(trying to play God?), is infinite.
And once the terrorists get this they will know exactly where to go to inflict the maximum possible damage. Brilliant.
to Sense Networks, signed Osama Bin Laden, thanking them for making it so easy to locate ideal bombing targets, especially in the western world. He also promises to try and avoid areas with high concentrations of children if Sense Networks releases an update that shows the average age of the gathered people.
I prefer to go out to places that are less-known but more interesting.
Thus is the futile quest of the hipster.
The really cool places generally ARE well known. The people that find them (who value finding obscure/cool places as much as it sounds you do) also love the recognition that they get by talking about going to those places.
Its tough for the cool places to keep up with those f*cking hipsters and their livejournals.
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