MIT Researches Map Cell Phone Usage 88
stlhawkeye writes "MIT researchers with the Mobile Landscape Projects have mapped a city based on cell phone usage. The article includes a map of Graz, Austria with a color-coded overlay indicating cell phone usage in various parts of the city. Using call origin and destination data, they are able to not only reverse-engineer a topographic map of the geography and landscape, but one of phone usage as well. The implications of the research have practical applications in law enforcement, emergency management, and traffic management. There are also, of course, privacy implications."
Invasion of Privacy (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Invasion of Privacy (Score:3, Funny)
Only CalTech's calls
- dshaw
Re:Invasion of Privacy (Score:3, Funny)
Caltech will probably release a map next week that highlights eavesdropping grad students at MIT campus.
Re:Invasion of Privacy (Score:3, Informative)
They wouldn't be able to eavesdrop on your call given the type of data this article says they have available. They only have access to some of the call statistics (location, origination, termination, etc...) and are nowhere near the pipe that is carrying the bits that make up your voice or data.
Re:Invasion of Privacy (Score:5, Informative)
Another aspect: cell phone companies design their systems based on call density & concentration - this could have been real news a decade ago. It's standard practice now. I can draw the cell phone usage in a city if you answer a few questions: where are the rush hour routes? where is the business district? what are the peak rush hour times? You can get a much better picture by actually analyzing a lot of data but the fundamental result will be the same!
Next up (Score:1, Funny)
Reception... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reception... (Score:1, Interesting)
WHat would be really useful is if phones automatically provided connection quality feedback. Like if you get one bar in an area consistently then the provider would know to look at that are to improve the signal or put up a new tower.
Re:Reception... (Score:3, Insightful)
The phone company has to keep records about where each call originated so that they can bill you properly. The network automatically keeps aggregate statistics about what's happened in each cell - how many times someone tried to make a call, how many calls connected, how many calls completed successfully, how many were cut off because of signal loss, that sort of thing.
If they see a high rate of failure coming from one cell, they can tell the network to gather more detailed information about it for a while
Re:Reception... (Score:1)
Do they record when someone loses signal? For instance, my old apartment was horrible as far as reception went - I could get zero bars if I stood on my front porch, but couldn't be understood (though I could dial out). But if I went inside, I had no service at all. Can they distinguish between someone merely turning their phone off, and someone going into a completely dead spot?
Of course, with Sprint, pretty much all of that city was a dead
Re:Reception... (Score:2, Insightful)
My telco (Orange in UK) refunds the cost of dropped calls, so if I'm wandering around and the call drops, I don't get charged. Also, when you turn your phone off, some signalling goes up to the network to tell them that.
One thing no-one has touched on is that the operator also has the regulatory considerations to their coverage - they may be required to cover a certain square mileage / proportion of the population (certainly in 3G) which means that they may have to cover an area entirely populated with
Re:Reception... (Score:2)
I should say that I probably don't have the whole picture. My expertise is in performance management, which is mainly concerned with ensuring that when someone wants to make a call, it connects successfully, and the network holds onto it until one party voluntarily hangs up. (My job really is to get that information in front of someone who knows what it means and what to do about it.) So when I say that some data isn't available, or isn't recorded, it might actually be in some other place that my customers
Re:Reception... (Score:1, Informative)
You better believe they care! One of our biggest problems is to help our customers keep the failed call attemps & dropped calls to an absolute minimum. There is tremendous competition between the infrastructure vendors in this area.
The volume of data recorded for each call (or attempted call) is vast including cell site ID, cell sector the access was attempted on, received RF strength (by both cell site AND by the mobile and in much better resolution than those silly
Red Peak (Score:3, Funny)
Link in article broken. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Link in article broken. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Link in article broken. (Score:1)
All calls terminate here (Score:2, Funny)
Geography... (Score:5, Funny)
What the hell are MIT researchers doing at Austria?!?
Re:Geography... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Geography... (Score:2, Informative)
besides, the current saturation of austria's cell phone market is above 83%, mobilkom austria has a market share of ~41%. i think this provides a good situation for researchers.
... but the girls and the styrian beer are good reasons anyway.
Good demographic info, too (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
From TFA (Score:3, Funny)
Privacy implications? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there are none. At least not any new ones than those implications by using cell phones at all.
The data about who uses which cell when does exist already and it needs to exist, in the current state, at all times in the phone system (how would you route calls without this information?)
Privacy concerns can surely be raised about storing such tracking profiles attached to particular persons. But just anonymized usage patterns?
Re:Privacy implications? (Score:2)
Not very much reduced. The set of mobile phones which frequently move between my home and the corner of the university where I work is very small.
Re:Privacy implications? (Score:2)
Therefore I said and also meant anonymized and not pseudonymized. I did not say 'phone ID# XYZ moved from A to B'.
Of course, if this ID# XYZ is unique to the phone or the SIM card, correlation to other data may in some cases be possible.
Re:Privacy implications? (Score:2)
Depending upon how many phones are in any cell at once, that might not make any difference.
Considerable (Score:3, Insightful)
There are considerable privacy implications.
For example: Law enforcement might notice cellphone activity in an area where none is expected - and go see what's going on there. Result: The uncover SOMEthing (a rave, a tresspass, a hermit, a criminal enterpirse, a fugitive, a meeting of political dissenters,
Re:Considerable (Score:2, Insightful)
If the "here" to which you refer is America, I would probably take Austria's privacy laws over yours, if given the choice. Given how the US administration is taking the so-called "war on terror" hype as such an excellent excuse to cancel any right to privacy, I'm not sure the US is a place I'd want to be. Of course, it doesn't help that other governments (e.g. Australia, Britain) are gleefully following suit...
Re:Considerable (Score:1)
Looking at that map, can you give my any single piece of information about any single person in that area based on what is contained in that map? Do you think anyone else could?
Some of your examples of how privacy is already breached by the existance of that map are not because of the map but what others could do with this mapping technology. The same could be claimed about any video camera or tape recorder
Re:Considerable (Score:4, Insightful)
I see no reason why aggregate, anonymized call origination data couldn't be used by police. In particular the example about police noticing an inordinate amount of calls from a location where there normally aren't any. I don't see any privacy violation in this.
Imagine that instead of looking for cell phone calls, which are electromagnetic waves being blasted into the ether, the cops were looking for visible light. They drive by a big abandoned farmhouse and notice lots of lights on. This doesn't give them probable cause to search, but it does give them a reason to knock on the door and ask for permission to search. And if, like many abandoned buildings, the property owner has previously informed the police that the building is posted against trespassing and unoccupied, they may be within their rights to walk right in unannounced, depending on the local laws.
This is no different from the cell phone case. Only in one situation they're seeing visible light, in the other it's electromagnetic radiation produced by two-way radios (that's what your cell phone is, after all). They can't enter and search a house based ONLY on this, obviously, just like they couldn't if it was just light emanating from the building. If they then went to investigate though, and found probable cause, or were given permission to search, any resulting arrests would not be "tainted."
The only way the privacy violation would come into play would be if the police, without a warrant or wiretap order, used the unique identification number of your phone plus the network's location data to put you at a certain location at a certain time. That, I think, would be obviously inadmissible, unless the records were kept by the carrier as a matter of course and obtained by a legitimate subpoena after the fact.
The difference, imo, is when an individual is being singled out for close observation and monitoring, versus when the data is being used anonymously and in aggregate. To come back to the original example of the rave/clandestine meeting/meth lab in the abandoned building, if the police saw that suddently there were 20 active cellphones where for the last year there have been zero, and decided to drive by and check it out, that's perfectly fine. But if they come and arrest you for trespassing because YOUR cellphone was operating from within said property at 2:43 AM last night, when there wasn't a warrant or wiretap order from a judge outstanding already, that's clearly not.
I am, of course, a nobody, so there's no reason my opinion counts for anything. However based on previous rulings concerning things like infrared observation from aircraft (to look for buildings that are being used as industrial marijuana growing operations), I wouldn't be surprised if what I just outlined is how things eventually work out.
Re:Considerable (Score:3, Insightful)
Where is the reasonable expectation of privacy? The only way I see reasonable expectation of privacy is if a law is specifically passed that says that you have it, and I could see this come to pass if everyone gets cell phones and uses them primarily. But until then, your claim is about as odd as asking other people not to notice the RF equivalent of fla
Re:Considerable (Score:1)
Re:Considerable (Score:2)
Re:Considerable (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, yeah, PT Barnum described the phenomenon accurately.... there's one born ...
Re:Privacy implications? (Score:3, Funny)
Library Usage Maps (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Library Usage Maps (Score:2)
Fremont in Seattle is not as Bright (Score:2, Interesting)
I live in Fremont, Center of the Universe [or so our neighborhood is claimed as in many public artworks], which is a neighborhood in Seattle, one of the most heavily wired and unwired neighborhoods with DSL and Cable modem and Gigapops galore. Many of us have ditched our electronic cell phone tethers and gone phoneless - because we don't want to be bothere
Re:Fremont in Seattle is not as Bright (Score:3, Funny)
Get this, buddy: I didn't have a cell phone way back in 1997. That's right, I was too cool to have a cell phone before you were even cool enough to get one in the first place! Beat that!
Re:Fremont in Seattle is not as Bright (Score:1)
Sorry, you snooze you looze.
It's like being vegan - that was hot ten years ago, but now it's old school.
Now, if you were from the planetary system Vega, now that would be hot.
Re:cell phone usage (Score:1)
Re:cell phone usage (Score:1)
Re:cell phone usage (Score:1)
Re:cell phone usage (Score:4, Funny)
Whaaaa (Score:5, Informative)
Why are these people reinventing the wheel?
We plot phone traffic patterns as a function of geography on a daily basis so we can make sure we have capacity where we need it. Hell, I could go to a plotter 25 yards from my desk and plot out a map very similar to the one in the article.
Honestly, sometimes I chuckle at what academics think is cutting edge. Years ago a friend of mine from school was discussing "new" compensation algorithms for telescopes which were in fact over 20 years old to the people who've been working in satellite recon.
Re:Whaaaa (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whaaaa (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Whaaaa (Score:2)
I live in the dead center of San Francisco and can't get a decent signal in or around our apt. We've tried multiple carriers to no avail.
Even with all those high tech resources apparently cell companies can't even get good coverage over a densly populated city measuring a whopping 7x7 miles.
Re:Whaaaa (Score:3)
It's also great the way they take the same data and run it through 3 or 4 different graphing algorithms and proudly present them as different analyses.
But the real culprits behind this are the funding bodies.
They've obviously put money into
I think you missed a word. (Score:2, Interesting)
I suspect the point of the article was that it can now be done in realtime. The journalist may not have picked up that plotting traffic patterns was old hat but I'm sure the MIT researchers knew. Realtime traffic patterns would have many more uses than daily plots of the traffic patterns particularly in responding to emergencies.
The article uses the words "regular intervals" which doesn't really give us much idea of how often this is but "realtime" suggests that it's somewhere in the realm of every minut
Re:I think you missed a word. (Score:2)
My point about interference cancelling was it's actually pretty common for academic researchers to produce things that aren't cutting edge at all because they b
Re:Whaaaa (Score:1)
a.
Brain Tumour (Score:1)
Google? (Score:2, Insightful)
error! (Score:1)
...Oh wait
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/15/121 2240&tid=111&tid=218 [slashdot.org]
What's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
AFAIK, every GSM network provider has a database of what network-cell their users are in at a given time, and when they make a call, so all these guys did was to map that info onto a map of a city? Doesn't sound THAT innovative.
On a related note: does anybody know of a J2ME program that reads out where the cell-phone it's running on is located at the moment? i once heard something about a "locationAPI' or something like that, but couldn
research??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:research??? (Score:2)
Something wrong with the map (Score:1)
...Oh wait
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/15/121 2240&tid=111&tid=218 [slashdot.org]
+1 Sci-Fi / Nerd (Score:1)
Can you see me now... (Score:3, Funny)
------------
Non contorque sub ubi voster. (Don't get your knickers in a twist).
stating the bleedin' obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Really? Who'd have thunk it? Outstanding deduction there.
cLive ;-)
Terrorist Bombs Triggered By Cell Phones (Score:2, Interesting)
I dearly hope that cell phone usage provide a window into this kind of activity. If the "privacy concerns" of this sort of cell-phone mapping are real, then the US military could exploit this in some kind of Able Danger style data-mining operation that might save some American soldiers' and Iraq
Re:Terrorist Bombs Triggered By Cell Phones (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Terrorist Bombs Triggered By Cell Phones (Score:2, Informative)
Rubbish. How could they? You can't get a mobile signal on the underground because it's so far underground. The bombs were on timers - at least, they were until the police decided to change the story for reasons known only unto them.
Many underground transit tunnels - and car/truck tunnels - have repeaters nowadays to provide cell phone, emergency signal, and radio services. However, this is not true of all tunnels, only some.
Re:Terrorist Bombs Triggered By Cell Phones (Score:1)
Perhaps, but the London Underground have already stated that mobile phones don't work on their subway, and won't work till at least 2008 ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/travel/features/tube/ tube_mobile.shtml/ [bbc.co.uk]).
Also following the London underground bombings of July, a misleading spam email was circulated stating that regardless of signal, mobile phones would still be able to connect to the UK's emergency services (999) if the user dialled 112. Obviously, if there is no signal, there's no way of being able to
Cool (Score:1, Informative)
The large red peak is, not surprisingly, the Technical University in Town.
The smaller peaks in the centre of the map seem to be the Hauptplatz, the schlossberg, and the new art museum - so people phoning to meet friends etc. This area is also the old town of Graz, and is thick with bars, clubs, and resturants.
The peaks to the top left are residental areas, but there is also a Technical college in this area as well, but this area is also rife for tr
Big Red Blob (Score:2)
Oh that? That's the movie theater.
-