August 01, 2005

Automatic Surveillance Via Cell Phone

Bruce Schneier blogs about the pervasivness of cell phones into our lives the volume of data you can collect from them.

    Eagle's Realty 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....

    He and his team were able to create detailed views of life at the Media Lab, by observing how late people stayed at the lab, when they called one another and how much sleep students got.

    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.

Posted by volubis at August 1, 2005 08:51 PM | TrackBack