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IBM Uses Call-Detail Records To Identify "Friends"
theodp writes "Big Blue may know what you did last summer. Or at least who you called. In a move out of the NSA's playbook, IBM Research has been scrutinizing the call-detail records of 'one of the largest mobile operators in the world' (PDF). By analyzing who calls whom, and for how long, IBM claims its patent-pending snooping software can now identify circles of 'friends' who tend to exhibit the same profit-threatening behavior. 'We believe that our analysis is a first of its kind that exploits the underlying social network in a telecom call graph,' boasted a team of IBM researchers and a UMD prof. For now, IBM seems to have focused on using the info to see if your friends are churners, so you can be dealt with pro-actively lest you follow their lead and bolt. However, IBM suggests its SNAzzy data mining technology (Social Network Analysis for Telecom Business Intelligence) has a bright future, noting it 'is also capable of analyzing any kind of social network or graph, not just telecom networks.'"
Without breaking our two year contract and sacrificing your deposit.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
So if several of my friends have poor credit ratings or are frequently arrested for petty crimes, I may not get a job?
Not good, not good at all.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I mean, what can you expect from a company that was perfectly willing to profit from the Holocaust?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
"UMD prof"
If this was an academic study, then the raw data was (or should have been) typified (anonymized). Therefore it would not be useful for identifying real world "friends" responsible for "profit-threatening behavior". Rather, it would be a group analysis tool.
Not to say I'd give my informed consent to any of this analysis, but clarity on how the raw was handled.
NSA: we snoop to find terrorist threatS (and whatever else we run into)
IBM: We snoop to find profit threats (and whatever else we run into)
-- Real Stupidity is the Artificial Intelligence of the 21st century
This sort of data-mining of quasi-private data to spot anomalous behavior is sometimes referred to as "terrorism informatics", since lots of the funding for it and interest in it comes from the case where anomalous=terrorist. Not sure it's going to be good for society to be applying the same sorts of intrusive analysis to legal things that are merely bad for business.
Of course, it's a tricky regulatory issue. On the one hand you might say that a business should be able to analyze its internal data however it wants. But on the other hand, most people view the phone companies as infrastructure, and people don't expect them to be analyzing their calls--- just providing them with service at the stated rates. And since they form a oligopoly of sorts with very high barriers to entry, it's not clear that "just don't do business with the shady ones" is a feasible solution.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, back to snail mail then. AC proof using gloves and cleanroom techniques. Unless all mailboxes come with mandatory cameras these days. But then again, just ask the neighbour to put the envelope in.
What's the big deal? A&T has long mined call detail records for marketing and fraud detection purposes. See, for example, papers on "Giga-Mining" and "Communities of Interest".
These are well-known techniques in the telephony world. AT&T has been using this for many years to combat telecom fraud; knowing who you call means that if you don't pay your bill but another phone number starts calling people in your circle of friends, they can identify that it's you making those calls. Communities of interest have also been examined in the context of IP networks and email. It's an interesting field of research and this seems like a novel analysis, though I'm sure they are doing something very similar within every carrier network.
Did people learn nothing from the last time IBM helped "profile" people.... in 1939-45?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
. . . I hit a Non-maskable interrupt right there.
The only down side, is that it requires everyone to use LU 6.2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LU_6.2
. . . has anyone seen a IBM 3745 in action recently . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
i been making excuses to hang up on people that waste my $airtime$ for years
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
You want to know what weakly superhuman AI looks like? It's here. We call them major corporations. We need to shoot these things in the head while there's still time.
See Matt Blaze's post The Metadata is the Message which gives a phone company placard saying among other things: Secrecy of communicatins is a basic requirement and important company policy. It includes divulging neither the conversation nor the fact that a call was made between two telephones.
The current dotcom culture towards privacy seems to be that anything not nailed down is theres. Screw 'em. We need completely anonymized peer to peer communication.
to analyze who the f*ck keeps calling me on my do not call listed cell offering crappy cheapo health care. A few months ago it was auto warranties. Hope this can track down the various unlisted/spoofed numbers I get these calls from.
University of Mass Destruction
As a former IBM employee, I am disappointed to see the company that gave us some of the best typewriters in the world, the mainframe and the Personal Computer, producing this sort of drek after slashing jobs in the US.
I guess it was a matter of time before "IBM India Research Lab" produced something like this. They certainly haven't been producing any real business machines or providing decent customer service to IBM Global Services customers.
Look for more of the same from IBM. IBMs CEO Sam Palmisano has said repeatedly in the past year that IBM will be focusing more on "analytics".
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Years ago, when I (and others) pushed the idea that personal information generated as one goes about one's life should be considered private property, this is the sort of thing I expected. We should have always owned the copyright on all information generated by living our lives - "I am the author of my own history", and derivative works like IBM's should be a copyright violation.
Now it's too late - the corporations own your personal life log, and they can do whatever they want with it so long as they don't tell anyone else "personally identifying information". They can even, in some cases, deny you the right to see what they know about you, and they certainly have no requirement to actively inform you about what they're tracking about you.
The relationship should have always been the other way around - "I'm letting you use THIS specific information you gather about me for THESE purposes - anything else you want to collect or do with data I've allowed you to collect, you have to ask, same as with any other private property." Someday, some corporation will overstep somehow, and people will get angry enough to force some change.
I like the bit about identifying "profit-threatening" behavior. How long before telcos use this to identify your friends and come up with cheap excuses why you can't choose those numbers for the "circle of friends" free calls so many of them offer. Not that talk-time matters much, most people that I know that are my age (22) use their phones for text messages more than for calling anyway. It's been at least two years since I used my phone to call more than I did to text. Not that I think it would require too much tweaking to analyze text message traffic.
This sig is false.
That tech sounds a lot like "nazi".
By the way, five years ago HP investigators wrote a paper about analyzing "betweenness" from mails between their employees.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That guy from Numbers does this almost every week.
I don't know about the majority of /. people, but I know that none of my friends spend much time churning milk into butter.
Switching networks? Dunno.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/21/2249
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/4/370
However, in these studies, all the subjects had joined the study and given permission in writing for the researchers to use their personal data.
It would clear a lot of things up if we could see the documents that the UMD professor submitted to the university's human subjects review board, and the documents they sent him in reply.
Systems oriented research will always try to test their algorithms on 'real' world data. This is a part of an research. Nothing wrong in using telecomm or whatever data for research. The issue of any regulatory or privacy issues only come in to play when any of such data is used in the real world by a company. When that occurs then it is a topic on /.
For now let researchers and research papers remain in academia or research labs and lets not get paranoid for nothing
Good reason not to use anything they touch.
Good luck IBM, I don't HAVE any friends!
So, what you seem to be saying is, to prevent my operatives inside the US from being uncovered, I should start using more than 6 layers of seperation between my active people, right? How does 36 sound? Which would mean, my message originates in Pakistan, then it gets relayed through - - - - holeeee - I mean, Allah Akbar, my phone bills are gonna go through the roof!
They could probably get a pretty good idea of who betrays confidences, gossips, etc. A lot of people would pay for that service-- really, even an "Ear Burning" notification when your name comes up in voice or text conversations. Google could deploy that by Tuesday if they wanted.
Oh, but I guess there are still a few of us who would see a downside to that.
Profit Threatening is not a crime (yet).
A phone company might actually use this data for consumer friendly purposes such as offering increased incentives for
the other members of the social network to stay such as any-network calling circles and lowering rates. The competitor
might offer "Bring your friends" deals to the switcher. It would be idiotic for a telco to not allow you to have your friends number.
... but they used the automatically-generated list of friends to give you a discount on calling those numbers. Great for bulletin boards.
This bullshit accusation comes up every time anyone mentions IBM and is a great way to get guaranteed mod points on oh-so-politically-correct-slashdot. Here's what "Foobar of Borg" doesn't tell you:
- the book was written by the former publisher of "OS/2 magazine", Edwin Black, who profited from his association with IBM for many years until its folding in 96
- Black also "co-incidentally" launched a high profile lawsuit against IBM that was summarily thrown out of court, but the press did not cover this fact.
- Many people have questioned the authenticity and accuracy of the accusations, which while juicy, do not stand up to close scrutiny.
Ultimately Black's assertions are like claiming that gun manufacturers are responsible for the murders that are committed with their products, or that manufacturers of crowbars are responsible for breakins, or that people who write Linux are morally responsible for the many people who die when it is used by the US military.
- Anonymous, because I will almost certainly be accused of being anti-semitic, even though I am jewish.
(Posting this to undo accidental moderation, sorry.)
So what's the fix for this?
Anonymous phone forwarding?
Or just give up on voice altogether until it's all anonymous packets?
I'd be interested to know what telecom gave the researchers the data. If I'd been a customer of that company, I sure wouldn't any longer. I think I'll switch cell phone companies and phone numbers, just to become part of the churners.
if you were so concerned about your 'web history'?
The patent application makes for interesting reading, and they have certainly developed a clever system for monitoring their customers and the relationships they have with other callers. The application states the obvious: It is easier to retain customers than to search for new ones, and with church rates of possibly 50% to 70% of subscribers per year, this is something that mobile providers have to worry about.
But I think this misses the point completely. Why are people churning? Could it be that mobile telephone service has become a commodity, and that mobile users are unable to discern any difference in call quality or service level between mobile providers? That is also a possibility.
Not to mention the multitude of different calling packages that mobile operators offer. There are so many different plans with different features and options that consumers are unable to make a rational, meaningful decision on which plan is best for them. And so maybe the carriers have caused churn in the first place: If I can't tell I'm getting the best value for the money, my best option is to keep switching plans and carriers, as the odds of me ever discovering the One True Plan are vanishingly small.
I was beginning to wonder whether they had a problem with butter
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
The problem with stuff like this is it's intended to crush dissent against institutions like big business and governmental power, things which democracy and liberty in stuff like the Constitution of the United States were meant to keep the government stable and the people happy, because they would adjust their lives to the reality of their social and physical environment. If Americans all know they are being watched all the time and more and more "odd" behavior (not simply disliking your boss) they will appear "normal" on the outside yet will be increasingly psychologically screwed up on the inside. Didn't the 50's tell us anything? Human history has been a sort of narrative of the struggle between the people at large against the desire for small groups to amass control over their lives in order to extract wealth, etc. If Americans are monitored and watched all the time, how will the USA be fundamentally different from Maoist China? It's obvious this sort of technology would be used by the ruling powers... business, religion, the military, the police... to ultimately control human beings even when the reason human beings are disobeying the authorities is because something is fundamentally wrong with the authorities way of thinking. If you destroy the social contract (the unwritten rule that the ruling powers will only be allowed to rule so long as they actually serve the interests of the people who created the power in the first place as a means of managing more complicated things) you pave the way for a culture that produces nothing new, and gives birth to uninspired youth, and has no inoculation against forces that will eventually destroy that society because it isn't flexible in the face of chaotic nature at all.
This obviously seems to be for Airtel which is the 10th largest mobile operator in the world and based out of India. This study has been done by IBM India research lab and IBM is the IT outsourcing provider for Airtel and manages their entire IT infrastructure. Not sure though if an operator in India can share details like CDR with a third party without the consent of its subscribers.
IBM is collecting our data again. I wonder why I don't trust them? "During the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War II, IBM had relationships and contracts with the German military/industrial technocracy. IBM's punch card machines were used by Germany to keep track of people who were to be subjected to the Holocaust ... IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM