Paranoia, Paranoia Everybody is Coming to Track You...

A recent June 9th press release issued by Sense Networks highlights the increasing social focus on digitizing our physical spaces. Sense Networks patent-pending technology is billed as a "software platform that indexes the real world using mobile location data."

The depth of information that Sense Networks is able to acquire may be surprising to a large number of people not familiar with the ability of mobile operators to track the approximate location of a given mobile phone user. In fact, this is exactly how the popular Apple iPhone is able to locate a user in the Google Maps iPhone application without requiring GPS hardware. When including the higher resolution of location data provided by GPS-enabled phones, of which there are approximately 175 million worldwide, platforms such as Sense Networks recently announced product line can produce some highly detailed, if not dazzling animations. To highlight this, one need not look further than the animations posted in the technology section of Sense Networks website.

The first animation is a fluctuating red blob that appears be a much slimmer representation of the United States. As it turns out, that animation is indeed a sequence of nation-wide mobile location data being played back over time. There is no indication to the speed of the playback however it certainly clear it visualizes a very large data set. Regarding the source of the data, Sense Networks states it is collected from “network-connected positioning technologies such as GPS, WiFi and cell tower triangulation.” Making no allusions to the subject of the data, Sense Networks goes on to state, “millions of consumers and businesses use location-enabled devices for finding nearby services, locating friends & family, navigating, asset- and pet-tracking, dispatching, sports, games, and hobbies.”

While the red blob animation is impressive the point is not entirely felt until one scrolls down the page and watches the second animation which details a night in San Francisco’s popular nightlife districts. In it tiny squares zip around the streets coming to rest for a bit only to zip off to another spot on the map. “Each color dot” states the webpage, “represents the presence of a particular nightlife tribe at a particular place and time.” It goes to define a “nightlife tribe” as “a type of people group who move around the city in a similar way, and visit similar places at similar times.” So while tracking individuals is possible there seems to be a lot of value in tracking group activity as well. The aim of the animation is to assert vivid detail in support of this type of tracking for the application of suggesting hotspots to users that they may enjoy but not be familiar with. Specifically, “rock clubs and hip-hop clubs each retain distinct tribal distributions. When a user is out at night, Citysense learns their preferred tribe distribution from time spent in these places. When that user visits another city, they see hotspots recommended on the basis of this distribution and combined with overall activity information.”

Of all the possible applications of the data possessed by Sense Networks, Citysense probably rates higher in the superficial sense -- yet, it should not be missed that this is merely one application of the data feeds and was no doubt chosen more for its sex appeal than its intelligence. This data can not only be used to track individuals and groups as they party but as they go to the grocery store, doctor or when they pick their kids up from school. Clearly there are considerations to be made by consumers when choosing their mobile carrier, namely, how much control does the mobile carrier give to their customers to decide whether companies like Sense Networks get their data or not.

For now, it appears there is much gold in mapping the people on ‘them there hills’ [sic] and for companies like Sense Networks there is literally a windfall of data on all of us being made available for a price.