Real-time maps of cell & Wi-Fi use -- disaster tool, privacy nightmare?

location based services

(Maura Welch does a nifty little biz blog for the Boston Globe, "Business Filter," with selected best-of posts collected in a Monday column in the print edition. The following item was included there..

More important, I'm ashamed to say that I hadn't seen the Dilbert mission statement generator until checking her blog. 'Nuf said. Henceforth, courtesy of Dilbert, this is Stephenson Strategies' new mission statement: "We exist to conveniently supply excellent information in order to synergistically create progressive paradigms because that is what the customer expects." Or something to that effect.... )


MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory creates real-time maps of how people move around a given area, as determined by pinging their cell phones or Wi-Fi laptops as they move (in this case, the map is of usage on the MIT campus).

This project illustrates both the pros and cons of real-time, location-based information using mobile communication devices -- especially the potential trade-offs between privacy and security. By sending SMS messages, individuals can opt in to being tracked -- and can also cancel the tracking immediately by another message (her/his trace will be automatically stopped 24 hours after activation). Italian architect Carlo Ratti, who runs SENSEable City, has done similar opt-in "maps" of cell-phone users in Milan and Graz, Austria.

This documentation of how people move through space could help architects and city officials design better "digital commons" -- even places where you could control fountains with your laptop!



Ratti places a lot of importance on the privacy issues. He told Technology Review, ".... city planners, telecoms, and private companies need to work together to design digital infrastructures that will protect individuals' privacy rights, by giving them control over the data. For example, someone might want to know that a friend is in a particular café, using a real-time map, so they can head there -- but he or she might not want the boss to know where they are." Of course, this is another variation on existing location-based social applications such as Dodgeball.com.



His general approach to privacy issues is to:


"'give the data back to the people who own it, the people who produce the data. They will be able to decide with whom to share it and when to share it.

"On the MIT campus [when the wireless project is fully developed], it will be you deciding on a peer-to-peer basis when you want to share your location with your friends, everybody, or nobody. You will be able to change these all the time to control in a dynamic way when to share this information with whom. You could imagine something similar with cell phones, but you would need to design it -- the system is a bit more complicated. We want to test it on the MIT campus and then expand it.'"

An important aspect of the real-time map is the fact that real-time, location-based information might influence people to change their behavior. According to Ratti:



"'Imagine you have a real-time situation of movement of traffic in the city. If everybody knew about that they could optimize their movement through the city based on overall conditions. For example, we've been invited to do a project for the Venice Biennale, probably the largest exhibition on architecture and urban studies in the world. It happens every other year in Venice, and this year it will be about cities. Our project is called Rome in Real-Time. We will be trying to overlay on the city map all the real-time information we can get today, starting from cell-phone information, but also including the position of buses and taxis, and overlay all of them on the map. This will be displayed at the Biennale in September and on an urban-size projection screen in Rome.'"


More important to Ratti than simply deciding which bus to take based on crowds is "...to really get the pulse of the city -- you can see where people are, where you can go and get a drink. Maybe you can also see tourists and the concentration of different nationalities in the city. You might imagine Italians aiming to go to the parts of town with the highest concentration of Scandinavian tourists." Hmm ... I can imagine terrorists chosing to go to the section of Rome where the largest number of American tourists are right now!

I'd really like to see such a system available -- but only on an opt-in basis -- as a critical element of crisis response. Not only would it allow officials to see where people are actually located at the time of the event (again, a critical advantage of real-time, location-based information in a crisis, because it concentrates on present reality, rather than normal behavior) to help them evacuate, but it could also allow officials to text message those who have opted in to assist in an emergency, asking them, for example, to relay a camera phone photo of the scene in case officials are not on the scene, and/or to send them localized response instructions.


If the public could also see these real-time maps, it would also allow individuals to find others in the wake of an incident with whom they could form ad hoc, self-organizing response teams. Of course, given the way insurgents in Iraq have timed the larger bomb to detonate after people have rushed to the scene of an earlier bomb, this might be a perfect tool for the terrorists. Given that, it seems to me that, in a crisis, it should only be the officials who could see the maps of how people are responding...



Such a system would have to be opt in, given the current poisonous distrust of public officials regarding privacy (yet another consequence that the Bush Administration should have, but evidently didn't, considered prior to launching the NSA surveillance programs) and the risk to individuals if, for example, their national identities could be tracked without them knowing it while on vacation in an area prone to terrorist attacks or kidnappings.


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