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20 Dec 07

Technology Review: What Your Phone Knows About You

Sandy Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, talks about "reality mining."
- this is page 2 of a 2-page article

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cell_phones mit_techreview sandy_pentland socialcomputing socialnetworks socialtheory

You can really see things in a way that you never could before--a God's-eye view. One of the examples I've been stuck on recently relates to how transformative Google Earth has been. Imagine having something where you can see all the people moving around on a map. Think about SARS in Hong Kong. What if in a particular apartment building, nobody left for work that day? You could identify a major health problem in 12 hours instead of two weeks. Another example is the social health of communities. It's known that social integration, or how well people mix, correlates with whether or not a community is thriving. With reality mining, you can actually see social integration, as it happens or doesn't happen. Once everyone can see it, then you can start to have transparent political discussions. Why isn't the mayor putting more sidewalks and crosswalks in this area? Could more community events make the area more livable?
- - that does presuppose that EVERYONE has a cell phone, though, and I'd bet that there are plenty of instances where populations that are vectors for contagious diseases don't typically carry cell phones, for example. Not to mention that (as the interviewer says in the next question), "this all gets very creepy very fast." - on 2007-12-20
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But we definitely need to talk about it and figure out a new deal for privacy--to use this data and not be abused.
- - d'uh, no kidding, Sherlock! - on 2007-12-20
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- You know, excuse the example, but I've been in a downtown somewhere and I don't know where the nearest bathroom is, or it's raining and I'd like a taxi. I'd give up a little bit of personal information to find these things.
  - - but there are urban services being introduced where you can pull that information from your cell phone, w/out giving your cell phone all sorts of access about yourself. - on 2007-12-20
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- Reality mining will help us see ourselves and, in an anonymous way, compare ourselves to peers. And I see organizations and companies using this to help people collaborate more effectively and do their jobs more efficiently.
  - - jeepers, just when I thought Michel Foucault had become really unfashionable, here're shades of Discipline and Punish! It's like Jeremy Bentham's Panopticum gone digital! Brrr... - on 2007-12-20
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Technology Review: What Your Phone Knows About You

Sandy Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, talks about "reality mining." Pay attention, interesting stuff!
- this is page 1 of a 2-page article

www.technologyreview.com/...19968 - Preview

cell_phones mit_techreview sandy_pentland socialcomputing socialnetworks socialtheory

Based on phone calls and the devices' physical proximity to other people's phones (as measured by Bluetooth), Pentland and researcher Nathan Eagle developed social-network models that were more accurate and more nuanced than those constructed from the subjects' self-reports.
Sifting through cell-phone data to get at the truth of people's social interactions falls under the umbrella of an emerging field that Pentland has dubbed "reality mining." And he thinks that social networks are just the beginning. The same techniques can be applied to other sets of cell-phone data to help people communicate more effectively, manage their time better, and even make their neighborhoods more livable. And it's all thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones--the ultimate data-collection machines.
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- the generalization is that maybe it can know lots of things about you. Take your Facebook friends as an example. The phone could know which ones you socialize with in person, which ones are your work friends, and which friends you've never seen in your life. That's an interesting distinction, and reality mining can make it automatic.
  - - and by making it automatic, you make part of an algorithm... - on 2007-12-20
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- It's about making the "dumb" information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life.
- Today's cell phones are on us all the time, and they come with hardware that can act as sensors for your environment. For instance, if Bluetooth is turned on, then the phone can see and be seen by other Bluetooth devices. You can start to make a record of the Bluetooth-enabled devices you encounter throughout the day. Then you can figure out, based on the frequency [with which] you encounter other people's Bluetooth phones, what sort of relationship you have with them.
  - - I think I get it, although it does sound a bit strange to let a device figure out what kind of relationship I have with someone...! - on 2007-12-20
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- And all phones have built-in microphones that can be used to analyze your tone of voice, how long you talk, how often you interrupt people. These patterns can tell you what roles people play in groups: you can figure out who the leader is and who the followers are. It's folk psychology, and some of the stuff people may already know, but we haven't been able to measure it, at such a large scale, before these phones.
  - - ok, now it's starting to sound a bit creepy... - on 2007-12-20
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