Slashdot Log In
Cell Phones Tracking Nightlife Activity
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jun 29, 2008 02:20 PM
from the ignores-all-cb-radio-based-night-life dept.
from the ignores-all-cb-radio-based-night-life dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "A Columbia University computer science professor has co-founded a New York-based company named Sense Networks to sell tracking software to other companies. It is also distributing a free version of this software, named Citysense, which shows on your cell phone where the wild things are happening in your own town. Citysense 'uses advanced machine learning techniques to number crunch vast amounts of data emanating from thousands of cell-phones, GPS-equipped cabs and other data devices to paint live pictures of where people are gathering.' Citysense is available today in San Francisco, before being soon deployed in Chicago and five other U.S. cities."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Those wild and crazy Japanese... (Score:5, Interesting)
...have been selling devices for years that match up males and females. You program your device for male/single/gay or whatever and when a compatible person is nearby in notifies you. Don't know how they notify- maybe a smoke detector alarm.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't crash their party (Score:5, Insightful)
More seriously, it appears that this technology is GPS-only and not all folks have GPS-equipped phones. I don't understand GPS all that well and I'm wondering how this tracking software can locate them, do they have to consent to being tracked, etc. This also has some scary big-brother implications if it were to move past GPS and into standard triangulation of ALL cell phones -- with or without the user's consent(well, kinda -- what percent of average Joe users actually read their EULA/cell contract/etc.), to be used for marketing purposes(or worse).
Re:Don't crash their party (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
it appears that in order to use this system, you also have to feed it your own information.
Why do have this "wild and crazy" vision of a CueCat?
Re:Don't crash their party (Score:5, Funny)
If a cellphone company ever tracks the cellphones of slashdotters they'll think we're dead.
"Hey Jim, that guy has been sitting in the basement for the last 48 hours!"
"Nah, he's still alive. Starcraft II came out three days ago."
Parent
Re:Don't crash their party (Score:4, Funny)
What's funny is the moment I read this I immediately went to starcraft2.com to see if you were telling the truth.
But alas, it was only a joke.
Parent
Isn't the noise and signal there switched? (Score:2)
If a Slashdotter is moving from their computer cocoon within 72 hours of Starcraft II being released, THEN I would send in the paramedics. Clearly he has either suffered from seizures or is perhaps being kidnapped, probably by Koreans upset that he forgot to gg them after a match.
keke
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He was busy searching for a no-CD hack and/or his torrent wasn't finished downloading. ;)
That, or he had to drive to five different towns before being able to find a copy in a retail store?
I dunno. :p
Re:Don't crash their party (Score:5, Informative)
More seriously, it appears that this technology is GPS-only and not all folks have GPS-equipped phones. I don't understand GPS all that well and I'm wondering how this tracking software can locate them, do they have to consent to being tracked, etc.
Actually, GPS isn't required to locate you with a cell phones. The technology exists to poll which cell phone towers your phone is polling and make a guesstimate of where you are based on that.
With cell technology, you're not simply talking to one tower at a time because if you were traveling, then as soon as you were out of range of the tower, you would have the call drop. So the cell phones are actively polling the towers as you move to hand you off between the closest (or best signal in some case).
This is how they locate you if you call 911.
The downside is that if you are in a rural area, and have only 1 or even two towers (it takes three to triangulate), then they can't really tell where you are other than somewhere in a radius of the tower. So this technique only works within areas with high cell tower density.
On a side note, you could always lend your cell phone to a girl when she goes to a Chip and Dale club and let the hilarity ensue when your friends show up there.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
My first thought when I read the OP is that this could be the means by which some terrorists plan their next attack.
No, I'm not trying to jump on the paranoia bandwagon (though I take a step closer every day), but seriously... This is rather benign information by itself that, when gathered and analyzed, is very dangerous.
"Where are the most people gathering right now? Where can we get the best results from an attack?"
"Here's a list of the 5 most populated areas."
See where this is going?
Re: (Score:2)
On a side note, you could always lend your cell phone to a girl when she goes to a Chip and Dale club and let the hilarity ensue when your friends show up there.
I assume you mean Chippendales [google.com] not Chip and Dale [google.com].
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I assume you mean Chippendales [google.com] not Chip and Dale [google.com].
There's a difference?!?! Oh God! Must cancel my son's birthday party ASAP.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
This also has some scary big-brother implications ....
Just on that point, think back to the 70's and early 80's before the public availability of condenser microphones and tiny FM (and AM) transmitters. Big Brother was as active as ever, spying as much as he could.
Big Brother will be using whatever technology is available (read: whatever is imaginable) to track and follow. If you can imagine someone tracking someone with a device that is always on (or can be switched on remotely), then there are no 'implications' but 'realities' to deal with here.
Re: (Score:2)
The Government can already track every modern mobile phone out there. It was a requirement so that (ostensibly) 911 can find you if you're in trouble and call for help but can't tell them where you are. The only way to be untrackable unless you have a truly ancient phone is to turn it off, and if you're really paranoid take the battery out.
Re: (Score:2)
cool... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
You clearly don't live in London, where it seems the more expensive a place is, the more popular it is.
I have no idea why that's the case (people hoping to spot a celebrity maybe), but it's usually quite a good way of working out which places you can afford to have a drink at, and which ones are likely to charge you £10 for a glass of water.
what could possibly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Or terrorists, for that matter.
That said, I can't see the utility of something like this being all that high. Sure, it'll appeal to the posers who want to be seen in the right places; but the truly cool people don't need a device to tell them where the parties are, and the truly nerdy don't care.
Come to think of it, the terrorists would be doing us a favor if they bombed the places frequented by those types. Let's turn it on and watch the species evolve ever higher!
Re:what could possibly... (Score:5, Insightful)
"it'll appeal to the posers who want to be seen in the right places"
Except it won't even do that - by definition, anywhere where there's thousands of people isn't 'the right place'. Believe me, no hipster would be seen dead in pacbell park during a game or in some mega-nightclub. Posers want to boast about how they were in some tiny artspace with only 100 of the cogniceti(sp?) last night, now how they were in some giant venue that every moron from the burbs had managed to find.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. Turn clubbing into Disneyland. Check your phone to figure out where the biggest lines are. Meanwhile people who have some sanity are sitting in a hole in the wall club enjoying a drink talking to others of like mind until that place too becomes the latest ride in the clubbing Disneyland.
Nightlife magazines will soon be reporting how to find clubs and trendy spots that are OFF the information grid. Personally, I can't wait for that one.
Improves? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not everyone's idea of fun is hanging out at a club. Some people would nearly die of boredom at a nightclub. Just because someone else's idea of fun isn't your idea of fun, doesn't mean they aren't having a good time. I'm sure the folks who like hanging out at clubs would get bored at a frantic LAN FPS game (what without people to hit on/get hit on by, the pointless braindead social banter, and the lack of certain mind-altering substances), or would be scared shitless driving around a track at high speed (b
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Clubs are for people who don't want "substances," rather they want one substance - ethanol. And they want to do so in a dark loud room where frankly being drunk seems alright. With a lot of other "cool" people, too.
Re: (Score:2)
Clubs are for people who don't want "substances," rather they want one substance - ethanol. And they want to do so in a dark loud room where frankly being drunk seems alright. With a lot of other "cool" people, too.
I thought clubs had lots of people on party drugs ("disco biscuits" for instance). But maybe that's just the ones I go to ;-).
If the people in the club don't have a similar idea of "cool", then you're in the wrong club (for you). I know places where 5% of the guys are wearing t-shirts that could have come from Thinkgeek (they're the lazy ones, who couldn't be bothered with the whole cyber/robot thing).
Re: (Score:2)
I always got bored at LAN parties (been to a couple, just at friend's places). I'm crap at games, and I don't like the competition, or sitting in the same room all night.
I'd much rather go to a pub (or two, or three) meet up with and chat to some friends, then go to a nightclub, dance (looks like exercise!) around, then chill out after (e.g. on the bus home, or at someone's house nearby).
P.S. not all clubs follow pop culture. They aren't all expensive either -- especially compared to the price of a high-spe
Re: (Score:2)
I usually left early, as my allergy to "plastic people" started to act up.
Re: (Score:2)
Two words... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Flash crowd."
Larry Niven, 1973. Sure, we don't have the instant travel, but this sounds like it would give much more immediate information than waiting for Jerryberry Jansen to randomly turn up at the incident with a portable TV camera.
Re: (Score:2)
You know you should go out more when you've read about flash crowds in Nevinyrral's Tome :)
Re: (Score:2)
Las Vegas (Score:2, Informative)
That's not how fun evenings work... (Score:2, Insightful)
Outside of areas with small populations, who in the demographic looking for nightlife would look for large groups of people to help determine where to go for fun? That's perhaps even dumber than determining the best movie to see based solely on the box office receipts from the weekend before.
Re:That's not how fun evenings work... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd probably use it to find where people aren't.
Parent
My thoughts exactly (Score:3, Funny)
I'm always struggling to find unpopulated, desolate areas for many of my hobbies. Being able to find an area with no people around would be very useful. The problem is that you run into the conundrum of whether to go to the non-obvious or obvious empty areas. Which one would someone looking for an empty area go to, in order to avoid others seeking the same thing?
Not helping at all (Score:5, Insightful)
I can already picture sketchy bar owners buying up a ton of these things, to make their spot appear "hot" even though it's dead. After all, the idiotic vodka-redbull sipping bar-hoppers instinctively gravitate to the busiest shitholes, and this "technology" exists solely to capitalize even further on their collective ignorance.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, some people prefer to be in a busy place so that they can meet new people, rather than a dead place with nothing going on.
That's not me; I prefer to spend time with the people I went to meet, and to actually be able to hear them, to be able to order my drinks in less than 30 minutes, and so on. But then again, I hate paying for drinks at bars anyway.
I'm happy doing both: one to meet new people, the second to dance around/be drunk/listen to loud music.
Spontaenous gatherings (Score:2)
If lots of people paid attention to where other people are and gravitated towards them, spontaneous gatherings of people could occur much like a planet would form in a young solar system.
Right?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe I'll just not have a phone anymore (Score:2)
Then the telcos decide to discontinue public pay telephones.
Meanwhile, the EU decides to make it a law that cellphones have GPS in them, "for safety reasons" of course.
Now, I read stories about big business tracking people by their cellphones.
Even without GPS, someone can track me with a fair degree of accuracy, and I'm sure someone has some rather fancy software out there that we haven't heard about yet, t
Re: (Score:2)
That's legitimate, it took police several days to track down a person that they thought was dying in an apartment after a prank call suggested it was happening.
Then there's the cases where you're calling 911 and don't know the address or are in a park or mall.
When things like heart attacks, strokes or crimes are happening, those couple of seconds can become priceless very quickly.
I know it's cool to be all super paranoid, but sometimes "safety reasons" are just that and not part of a huge conspiracy to take
Re: (Score:2)
sometimes "safety reasons" are just that and not part of a huge conspiracy to take away your freedoms
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Good idea, but not very practical (Score:3, Informative)
This is an interesting idea, but it won't catch on for a few more years. The problem is that only a tiny fraction of cell phones (I would estimate less than 1%) are capable of GPS tracking now. Of those people who have a compatible phone, most won't bother to install the app and remember to start it whenever they go out. Typical battery life when GPS is turned on is about 8 hours. So this is not an app that can run in the background 24/7.
In the end, you will have something like 10 people in San Francisco who send data to their system. It is enough data to make sense of what's happening in the city? Not hardly.
Give it another 5-10 years, and perhaps most phones will have GPSs in them. Perhaps battery life will improve enough to make continuous GPS tracking possible. Until then, this service, and other similar services, will have little value.
Emanating? (Score:2)
How do just I stop my cellphone from "emanating" this data? I don't want a bunch of losers tracking down the hot nightlife I find and create, just because they subscribe to some website. TimeOutNY has already ruined too many places with a load of bridge & tunnel dweebs.
Maybe the cool places should all jam these "emanation".
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the cool places should all jam these "emanation".
But then all the people in the know would realize that the "black holes" on the map is where it was really happening.
Also,
[Insert joke about jam and emanation(sic) here]
But we already know where nerds will be all night! (Score:2)
At our keyboards, in our studies/bedrooms, right?
(Checks local time: 12:30 am, and I'm at my keyboard checking /. [sigh]).
This sucks (Score:2)
FTFA: "Translation: if you have a Blackberry, you have instant 411 on where the cool folks are. Or, are not"
What? "Cool folks" and " where the wild things are happening in your own town."
Why would I need that service, in my own town?
I can only only images tons of cheesy spam-like messages in larger citys: "Eat at Genuine Tony's Pizza. Discount for the next 45 minutes"
In the small-town it will be things like "Garden mowever 70% discount at Wal-Mart"
No, it will probably never fulfill your wet dreams, unless i
This just in... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What? Flamebait? Seriously! It seems like it would be potentially interesting, and I went to the site and looked hoping to find something normal-web-browser-based, but it wasn't there. You couldn't run this thing on an iPhone, either. =( Very limited.