Cell phone stats reveal dark secret: We're really boring

Last update: June 4, 2008 - 10:02 PM

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News flash: We're boring.

New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cell phones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home.

Comfort zone: "Individuals display significant regularity because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work," the researchers found.

Research frontiers: That might seem like science and mountains of data being marshaled to prove the obvious. But the researchers say their work, which also shows that people exhibit similar patterns whether they travel long distances or short ones, could open new frontiers in fields such as disease tracking and urban planning.

Close to home: Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-wide circle for a half-year. Nearly half of the people pretty much keep to a circle little more than 6 miles wide and 83 percent of the people tracked mostly stay within a 37-mile-wide circle.

Anonymous tracking: The researchers said they used the potentially controversial data only after any information that could identify individuals had been scrambled. Even so, they wrote, people's wanderings are so subject to routine that by using the patterns of movement that emerged from the research, "We can obtain the likelihood of finding a user in any location."

The researchers obtained the data from a European provider of cell phone service that was obligated to collect the information. By agreement, the researchers did not disclose the country of the provider.

Where do they go? The researchers were Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, an author of the project and the director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston, and his Northeastern colleagues Marta C. Gonzalez and Cesar A. Hidalgo. They tracked 100,000 cell phone users selected at random from a population of 6 million for six months. The location of the user was revealed whenever he made or received a call or text message. Because calls and messages tended to be sporadic, the researchers used a smaller data set that captured the location of 206 users every two hours. The results of the two data sets were similar, according to the report in the journal Nature.

Ethical issues: The use of cell phones to track people, even anonymously, raises serious ethical issues, said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. While researchers are generally free to observe people in public places without getting permission from them or review from institutional ethics boards, Caplan said, "your cell phone is not something I would consider a public entity."

NEW YORK TIMES, AP

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