'Your phone spies on you', Wired Magazine.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

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Hidden Persuaders 2: Mining the digital trail to map your tastes and desires. By James Silver

In a snapshot of San Francisco, late on a Friday night, multi-coloured dots whiz across a street-map of the city like high-speed, radioactive ants. But this is no ordinary portrait of a big city at play. In fact, it’s a “behavioural map”, charting the patterns of party-goers and night owls as they move through the night.

Each dot represents a person, sifted into colour-coded “tribes” – with names like “Young & Edgy”, “Barflies” or “Homebodies” – which cluster in similar places, at similar times. Over the ensuing hours, the map becomes a kaleidoscope of body-heat as the city’s story unfolds.

Launched by New York-based start-up Sense Networks, CitySense is a free mobile application, currently covering only San Francisco. Download it, and you can view activity levels in nightlife hotspots in real-time, discover where others in your “tribe” have chosen to go and link to Yelp and Google for venue details.

The raw data driving CitySense, and Sense Networks’ commercial venture MacroSense, has been gathered from the movements of mobile and smart-phone users. The data comes from GPS, WiFi and mobile phone-tower triangulation, which in turn comes from the company’s clients, ranging from giant mobile phone operators to boutique application-designers.

By tracking individual dots on the go and cross-referencing them with other public data such as census figures, in a process known as “reality mining”, Sense Networks builds an “index to the real world” – a lifestyle log of latitudes and longitudes, of time-stamps and demographics.

“As people move through areas, we pick up the breadcrumbs,” explains Greg Skibiski, Sense Networks’ CEO and co-founder. “Location data, created all day long just by having a phone in your pocket, is probably the richest source of information in the world today.

"For every place and time in the world, we can see where everyone came from to go there, and where they go to after they leave. Google indexes the internet by watching people move as they click around the virtual world. We’re using location data in the real world in the same way.”

CitySense, which will be rolled out to New York and other cities including London later this year, was not built “for commercial value”, claims Skibiski. “We’ve never even thought about putting advertising on it or charging for it. The point was to give people something free and show them that using this data for reality mining isn’t something they should be scared of.”

Nevertheless, he accepts that consumers are likely to be deeply resistant to the idea of being tracked by their mobile data - even as unidentifiable dots. “I know a lot of people’s gut reaction will be like ‘Oh you’re going to have my location data, you’re going to know where I am, I hate you!’,” he says.

“I don’t want anyone storing my location data either. But we have the opportunity, since we’re first, to set the bar really high. We say you should own the data you generate, and, even if someone else is holding it, you should have the right to delete it.”

But as smartphhones grow smarter and “open” operating systems like Google’s Android or Symbian proliferate, the quality of collectable data will grow ever-richer, providing marketers with hitherto undreamt-of opportunities to target messages with pinpoint accuracy, particularly to people on the move.

Until now, the advertising industry has mostly been restricted to using quantitative research to gather data on consumers. No wonder, then, that they are cock-a-hoop at the prospect of an uninterrupted flow of ‘live’ behavioural information.

“Real action, in real time, would be fantastic,” says Ann Mack, head of the trend-spotting department at J Walter Thompson (JWT) in New York. “The amalgamation of all that data, could be very rich and help marketers and people such as myself anticipate what people will need, when, and how their movements map their wants, needs and desires.”

Skibiski argues that, so long as data is shared with marketers “in a privacy-preserving way”, customers will opt in. “If you can offer coupons and discounts, and do it in a way that gives people a real benefit for sharing a little information about themselves, then I think people will love to be a part of this,” he says. But will the ever-mobile public accept the real-time mapping of desire?

(Wired magazine, 4th June 2009)

Posted by James Silver - On Thursday, June 04, 2009

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