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Cell Phone Data Predicts Movement Patterns
azoblue writes "In a study published in Science, researchers examined customer location data culled from cellular service providers. By looking at how customers moved around, the authors of the study found that it may be possible to predict human movement patterns and location up to 93 percent of the time."
Seeing how 66.67% of the time I am either sleeping at home or at work it shouldn't be too hard to fill the other 27% with commute/grocery shopping.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
While not to the exactness of this study, this has been done before in May 2009 ( http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/science/jan-june09/celldata_05-15.html ). From the article:
analyzed six months of anonymous cell phone records from more than 100,000 people in a European country, obtained from a European cell phone provider. Those cell phone records gave an approximation of each person's location at the time of each call, because cell phone calls are routed through the nearest cell tower. He and his colleagues found that people tend not to stray far -- almost three quarters of the people stayed mainly within about a 20-mile circle for the entire six months, and nearly half the people rarely strayed outside a six-mile circle. They also tended to go back and forth regularly between only a few locations, such as home and work.
And another attempt on the same idea was done by MIT in July 2005 ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/1751234 ). Difference here was that the percentage was 85%. Not the 93% declared now. From the Wired article:
Eagle's Reality Mining project logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers, and was quickly able to guess whether two people were friends or just co-workers.... 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.... Eagle used Bluetooth-enabled Nokia 6600 smartphones running custom programs that logged cell-tower information to record the phones' locations. Every five minutes, the phones also scanned the immediate vicinity for other participating phones. Using data gleaned from cell-phone towers and calling information, the system is able to predict, for example, whether someone will go out for the evening based on the volume of calls they made to friends.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
So you're saying that analyzing movement patterns allows you to predict movement patterns. Would you like to guess the color of my red car?