No place to hide

Surveillance technology is developing both at street level and at a macroscopic level d but will it do the job, and at what cost? The Reality Mining project at MIT’s Media lab could enable others to predict your behaviour with almost perfect accuracy, thus destroying the shreds that remain of your personal privacy. Not that the researchers intend this, but the eventual use of a research concept doesn’t always mirror its original purpose. Students at MIT’s Media lab and the adjacent Sloan Business School are using 100 special Nokia cellphones. Each carries a parasite application that logs everything from cellphone tower ID to call logs and nearby handsets to which the phone has established a Bluetooth connection. The phone uploads the data to a central database that uses an inference engine to work out trends in behaviour. Researchers believe that they can predict with remarkable accuracy the movements of most individuals. In many cases, they get it right over 90% of the time. The ability to identify individuals and their social networks with such accuracy could be invaluable for epidemiology studies and disease tracking, where data about the movements and relationships of individuals could be used to predict and control the spread of contagious diseases, for example. This carries significant implications for privacy and surveillance. The result could be a scenario in which everything about your communication activities could