Call center: This network shows phone calls between around two million cell phone users in Belgium over six months; each dot represents a tightly connected group of people, and its color represents the language they speak. The Dutch-speaking (green) and French-speaking (red) communities are starkly divided, linked only by a smaller cluster representing users in Brussels.
Courtesy of IOP
A snapshot of our activities, cell phone data attracts both academics and industry researchers.
Cell phone companies are finding that they're sitting on a gold mine--in the form of the call records of their subscribers.
Researchers in academia, and increasingly within the mobile industry, are working with large databases showing where and when calls and texts are made and received to reveal commuting habits, how far people travel for public events, and even significant social trends.
With potential applications ranging from city planning to marketing, such studies could also provide a new source of revenue for the cell phone companies. "Because cell phones have become so ubiquitous, mining the data they generate can really revolutionize the study of human behavior," says Ramón Cáceres, a lead researcher at AT&T's research labs in Florham Park, NJ.
If you were an AT&T subscriber and were near Los Angeles or New York between March 15 and May 15 last year, there's a 5 percent chance that your data was crunched by Cáceres and his colleagues in a study of the travel habits of the company's subscribers. The researchers amassed millions of call records from hundreds of thousands of users in 891 zip codes, covering every New York borough, 10 New Jersey counties, as well as Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura counties in California.
The data set is a collection of call detail records, or CDRs--the standard feedstock of cell phone data mining. A CDR is generated for every voice or SMS connection. Among other things, it shows the origin and destination number, the type and duration of connection, and, most crucially, the unique ID of the cell tower a handset was connected to when a connection was made.
That let the AT&T team know the location of a phone to within a mile radius at the time each CDR was generated, making it possible to determine the distance traveled from home by each cell phone every day. The group found that, on average, people living in Manhattan travel 2.5 miles most days, compared to five miles in Los Angeles. "But we also found that when you look at the longest trips people make, people that live in New York go significantly further, 69 miles on a weekday compared to 29 in Los Angeles," Cáceres says.
Cáceres hopes to work with city planners, who would usually have to resort to expensive and limited surveys to gather such information. "This kind of data can help them decide how to invest resources, for example if they want to know where to build a new train or subway station," he says. The AT&T work was presented at a recent workshop in Cambridge, MA, earlier this month as part of the NetSci conference on network science.
Mobile carriers might get marketing insights from studying whom you call and what device you use.
A real-time auction system will create even more targeted ads.
Multi Billion Dollar Fraud Detector
Acknowledgment - I understand all you Privacy Law folks are going to be squeamish about these suggestions, but protecting the privacy of a person who PAYS taxes is equally important to those who RELY on subsistence from said taxes. Therefore the ACLU can "bite my @$$" and perhaps start protecting the rights of Taxpayers in this country for a change.
As fellow tax payers - we should have the right to know who is taking our money, so we may question them directly. The ACLU and government agencies are not protecting our interests and quite possibly are violating some of our basic Constitutional Rights. Basically TAXATION WITH REPRESENTATION (or Transparency).
Can this type of Data Mining be used to track some of the following?
* Cell Phone usage of illegal aliens? Where are calls being made? Look for Pre Paid cell phones to start.
Other Data Mining Ideas
* Merge a Web Based Mapping tool with anyone who applied for the $8000 tax credit for First Time home Buyers. Then coorelate the addresses with the USPS to find the mis-matches between the ID on form 5405 and the address where mail is supposed to be delivered. It's illegal to rent a home that was paid for using the $8000 allowance. The owner HAS to occupy their new home.
* Search all State databases for persons recieving Welfare, Food Stamps or financial assistance based on tax payer dollars and map them.
* Merge Welfare Records against New Car Buyers - it seems that there is a good chance somebody is purchasing their latest ride using tax dollars.
* Merge Auto Insurance claims against unemployement programs. There's a good chance some person reciving benefits does not (or is not) living in the state they are getting money from but becasue of electronic fund transfers is having their money forwarded to them.
* Query the IRS databases to see who claimed "Exempt" on their taxes, and map their location to a web mapping tool. I am sure there are lots of folks working under the table. There are legitimate reasons for filing Exempt too.
* Merge Auto Insurance data records with State Welfare to see who driving really expensive cars, or vehicles beyond the recipients ability to pay.
* Merge State and Federal Databases to anyone who did not file taxes at all and then treat them as Out of State Students for school and deny them the right to register their cars to drive on public roads. Otherwise they can take a public bus or pay Out of State Fees for car registration. This trick will catch Drug Dealers and other criminals pretty easily.
***
Anybody have some other ideas??
Re: Multi Billion Dollar Fraud Detector
Given the abuses of power that Western governments have been tending toward over the last couple decades, I am less concerned about the utility of the data and more concerned that it is not used improperly.
If a warrant is obtained - great, get all the data you need and use it for your legitimate criminal investigations. If a warrant is not obtained, government actors should not be able to access the data whether they want to pay for it or not (and should be indicted and prosecuted if they do).
I would love to see a telecom company come out and offer a service plan that binds them to keep subscriber data secret. That would be a nice change and I suspect such a company would generate a good-sized subscriber base and could even charge a small premium over the AT&Ts, Verizons, and the like that are more than happy to sell out your information. As far as I know, no telecom markets themselves in this manner.
Re: Multi Billion Dollar Fraud Detector
Add to the "insurance fraud" uses of cell phone databases creative ways to assist in detetion of Workman's Compensation, Medicare/Medicaid and foodstamp fraud.
How can cell phone databases be utilized to enhance the accurance of Census data?
If you use a cellular network (that you don't own) then your calls are datapoints. Get over it or stop using it.
PS Don't be an outlier.
"Don't be an outlier"
Lol - innovation and discovery are no longer virtues? You may be on the wrong forum.
What's the second part of that sentence: 'don't be an outlier, be a sheep'?
With regard to privacy, the debate here and elsewhere is missing an extremely important point that I have predicted will become a test case for the U.S. Supreme Court in the not too distant future.
That is-- when a medium, device, service, or application becomes necessary to achieve 'inalienable rights', such as the need to communicate for security, make a living, etc. -- the individual no longer really has a choice, particularly when opting in or out isn't clear.
An interesting development that will help shape this entire debate -- perhaps even determine -- is the healthcare reform legislation that charges HHS with deciding on standards-- including mobile, for accessing EHRs -- expected to cover 95%+ of Americans within the next few years.
We had to deal with the issue in our just unveiled semantic healthcare platform, so I included in our diabetes use case scenario:
http://www.kyield.com/images/Kyield_Diabetes_Use_Case_Scenario.pdf
Perhaps the answer to this question is hidden somewhere in the above posts, but I'm wondering whether it is lawful to use those CDR's without people (at both ends of those links) knowing about it. I don't know about US laws, but I am unaware of any such form that I (voluntarily) signed.
It seems to me that this research can be performed even with the numbers masked, so I'm wondering why nobody's raising that issue.
In any case, many things are possible if you start any kind of (behavioral) analysis, but I'd be fine with that if they convinced me (with laws, perhaps?) that there are limits and that the use is benign.
The FCC has regulations called CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information) that cover the use of personally identifiable call records.
Here is link to a brief synopsis:
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/phoneaboutyou.html
But once, the data is made anonymous, it’s a whole different ball game. The key point is how early in the use is the data anonymized and who has the full personally-identifiable data?
Your cellphone provider knows where you live,
They know who you are, they know what you did,
When you called your boss to say you were lame,
They know what your up to so get used to the game,
As user data becomes more valuable and gives operators an oportunity to generate profit, data disclosure and usage will eventually have to be regulated. A win-win situation might be that if a user agrees to share his CDR data, the operator could provide discount on calls or monthly bill.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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aunderdown
77 Comments
Privacy
The article quotes Blondel as saying "I feel the scientific community should take responsibility for finding out how to trade off having useful data and protecting privacy."
I think that computer scientists can define the parameters of these tradeoffs, i.e., the possible options; but the responsiblity for what tradeoffs will actually be implemented should be shared by a wider group of stakeholders; the most important of these being mobile device users. As the recent confrontation between Facebook and its users has shown, even information age technophiles have some good old fashioned reservations sharing their information.
Personally, I see the utility of aggregating the type of location/time data mentioned in the article to track consumer trends; but I don't like the idea of cell phone usage patterns being linked to individual customer profiles. It's just too intrusive.
Reply
ghoust4
1 Comment
Re: Privacy
In all reality we volunteer our information whenever we use these systems. If you don't want someone to know something about you, don't volunteer that information.
I understand the desire to feel like you should be in control of what is being shared but the truth is that you are. Just don't give the information in the first place. The issue might have to do with what we are sharing that we don't know about. Full disclosure might help people make better decisions about what and how they share their personal information.
As far as the usefulness of the data; anything that we do to blur or hide information in an effort to get some feeling of pseudo privacy takes away from the information that could be gleaned from this data. I'm not a very good theorist but I'm sure someone could think of a good use for all the information that is actually stored in a cell phone call log.
Reply
aunderdown
77 Comments
Re: Privacy
You raise an excellent point, one that everyone should incorporate into their online behavior. Whatever you put online becomes part of what the world knows about you. One should manage it accordingly.
My concern with this article though relates not so much to the information content which I choose to put out there, but rather about my online habits being tracked - both locationally and in time. Right now, I can't think of any specific examples of how this type of tracking could work to my disadvantage, but I just don't like the idea of companies being able to monitor (or access an archived record of) my activities. Companies these days spend a lot of time gathering information on customers and prospects, supposedly to enable them to better serve customers' needs. But I think today's marketing focuses more on manipulating people to buy stuff they don't need or to alter their perceptions of the product by manipulating their emotions. Although I am a died-in-the-wool capitalist, I am also an annoyed consumer and am unenthusiastic about technology that puts more of my personal information in the hands of marketers.
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