Cellphones are god and we will bow

Not only do Apple's iPhones track your movements, so do Android phones.

Androids collect location data every few seconds and transmit to Google every hour or so. Google says the data are anonymous, but they are keyed to a unique phone identifier. So it doesn't sound truly anonymous to me.

There are already calls from Congressman for hearings, but, honestly, my concern isn’t so much with the data collection as it is with the possibility that the government itself may start accessing that data. Because, face it, corporations want personal data mostly so they can sell us stuff, governments want it so they can control and track us. I don’t mind the first, I do mind the second. So the primary concern with regard to Apple and Google should be whether they’re keeping the data they collect private, both from potential identity thieves, and from the state.

Exactly.

What is disturbing, though, is that this automatic data collection from dozens of millions of smartphones is taking us straight to a real-life "Minority Report."




The WSJ reports, 'Researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data, uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our political views."

'Phones can know,' says an MIT researcher. 'People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior.'

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play....

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.

And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.

"Phones can know," said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, who helped pioneer the research. "People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior."

Anyone acquainted with history knows with certainty that governments are not going to ignore these sources of information. They will first try to hack into foreign databases for intelligence purposes. After all, "Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone." Being able to assess the movements of millions of foreign nationals inside their own borders will yield incredible and accurate insights into what is happening or about to happen in that country militarily, economically, socially, politically. And the kicker is that enough data from one smartphone enables database miners to predict with accuracy of 90-percent-plus where the phone's user will go next and what s/he will do.

Researchers have already discovered that by analyzing the frequency of emotionally-laden words in Twitter messages, they can predict "changes in the Dow Jones index up to six days in advance with 87.6% accuracy."

It simply is not possible to believe that this information will remain only in the hands of private business. And remember that in many (maybe most) other countries, phone systems are run by the government to begin with.

I wrote in 2003,

When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

I frankly never imagined that the day would come so quickly. But it is upon us now.