The Latitude And Longitude Of Cell Phones
Location, location, location. That phrase has long been associated with the real estate industry, but it’s rapidly becoming the mantra of the mobile communications industry.
That’s because we’re all traveling around with homing devices in the form of cell phones and GPS units. All that high-tech mobility is providing opportunities — and challenges — for those in the telecom industry.
This point was driven home for me at a recent gathering of wireless researchers and experts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The workshop was put together by Kaveh Pahlavan, a professor at WPI who established the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies at the school.
Fixing Coordinates
I had assumed, wrongly, that the telecom industry had pretty much figured out how to locate a cell phone call, no matter where that call is made. But it’s not that simple. According to the folks I spoke to at the conference, who work on these exact issues for big wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T, the industry has got the basics down, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. In rural areas, for example, it can still be quite a challenge to figure out the location of a cell phone user. And then there’s the Z-axis problem. You see, the technology is not quite there yet for wireless carriers to know if an individual is calling from the 50th or fifth floor of a skyscraper.
Beyond the highly-technical presentations on geopositioning protocols, the workshop also included presentations on how end-users (that would be people like you and me) are using the location technology and how, in turn, researchers are harnessing that data.
One of the presentations was from Marta C. Gonzalez, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT. She and her team of researchers have been using statistical physics (Don’t worry; I’d never heard of it before, either) to analyze cell phone tracking data and create models predicting human travel patterns.
“The research opportunities that this data presents are tremendous,” she said.
Before you get too nervous about Big Brother implications, it’s important to note that Gonzalez is only interested in this data in the aggregate. She doesn’t care where you buy your groceries. Her goal is to put all the data together, come up with a sound model, and “extract visit patterns of everyone in a city or a country.” Armed with those patterns, there are a lot of implications for transportation planning and energy consumption.
But there are real privacy concerns about all this tracking information. Ziv Baun, co-founder of Zipano Technologies in Pittsburgh, tackled that exact topic. His company, a spin-off from Carnegie Mellon University, has developed software to help people better control their privacy on the Internet so they can escape — when they want to — from GPS tracking.
Their software is used by the Facebook App Locaccino, which is a program that allows you to share your whereabouts with other Facebook users. Locaccino tracks your coordinates using a “locator” that’s installed on your laptop or phone (it currently only works with Symbian and Android phones), but its claim to fame is flexible privacy settings.
For example, you can set up an account with Locaccino and form rules that only share your whereabouts when you are in the City of Worcester, but not when you are at home. It also allows you to share your location with some friends, but not others. So, you can make sure your boss doesn’t get an update when you’re at the bar during lunch.
Cell phone subscriptions hit 4.6 billion globally at the end of 2009, according to the International Telecommunication Union. That’s a whole lot of data for Gonzalez to analyze and Zipano Technologies to protect. There may be a lot of uncertainty in today’s economy. But one thing I know for sure is that we’re becoming an increasingly mobile society. And our travel patterns are going to become increasingly important to those in the tech sector as well as marketers.
Got news for our Digital Diva column? E-mail Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
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