The Numerati author Stephen Baker has a fascinating article on Sense Network's location-monitoring technologies in the March 9 BusinessWeek. Aided by location-aware devices carried by many of us, Sense engineers can display people as color-coded dots moving across a city, in real time. They have a pretty good idea what those dots are doing, their employment status, and their age and income level.
In many cases Sense engineers can even "name that dot," if they wanted to, though they told Baker that Sense's data products don't need personally identifiable information to be valuable, and they don't want to court a privacy backlash. I wonder about that. Do privacy concerns really dissipate if the data collected is not personally identifiable? The operating assumption in the online industry is yes, and the presence of PII is in fact the trigger for most privacy regulations, leaving a lot of space for unregulated (and very cool) data-mining activities.
BusinessWeek put up a video here but not the article itself unfortunately.
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