The new generation of phones doesn’t just know where you are — it knows what you’re doing.
Touchstone Pictures / Via eonline.com
Not only does your phone know where you are at all times — that's been true for years — it now knows exactly what method of transportation you've chosen to get there.
A new phone bought today can sense if you are walking or running, if you drove to your destination in a car or hopped on a bike. Far better than most pedometers, it can tell you how many steps you've taken and in which direction you went. It knows how long you stayed out at the bar last weekend and how you got home. And it's getting more accurate by the day.
In addition to GPS receivers, modern smartphones contain a variety of tiny motion sensors that assist all kinds of mundane, but essential, tasks. There's a compass, a gyroscope that lets your phone know how you're holding it, and accelerometers to determine relative movement.
But these sensors have just started to reach their potential. The minute movements and rotations of your phone, in conjunction with its awareness of your location, can provide a shockingly complete picture of not just where you are, but what exactly you're doing.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki announced they've developed an algorithm that accurately reveals modes of transportation based solely off of movement data collected from mobile phones. By studying over 150 hours of accelerometer data, the Finnish team found their algorithms have improved transportation mode detection by over 20%.
Helsinki Institute For Information Technology / Via universe.hiit.fi
In other, similar research, even the roughest data has painted a remarkably clear picture. A 2011 study by AT&T Labs found that that call detail records (CDRs), which anonymously document the wireless signal of every SMS message and call, in Morristown, N.J., look very similar to U.S. census data of the same area. According to the study:
We can identify patterns of human activity in different parts of a city—a city's lifebeat — by observing cell phone usage in different cell tower antenna coverage regions. By studying these patterns, city officials could potentially model the typical flow of people between different parts of the city over time. Monitoring these patterns might in turn allow the timely detection of anomalies such as dangerous overcrowding surrounding a popular music concert, or following the traffic flow during a weather emergency.
And here's what it looked like:
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