What Your Cell Phone Knows About You

What does your phone know...and how much additional information can it gather.... "Basically, that means that with just a cell phone, you can go into organizations and find out how happy and how productive people are, which is really pretty amazing.. Phone companies are required to keep location data for a certain period of time for just that purpose. That fact is, cell phones have to talk to cell towers, and that means they always know where you are."....your cell phone can be a sociometer, gathering all kinds of information....technology is there, but there's privacy issues as to what is to be shared...new tern coined "Reality Mining"....and some information can be useful with fighting diseases....BD 

Can your cell phone tell if you're happy or overworked?  Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think it can do that and more--separate the rich from the poor, the sick from the healthy, even the outgoing from the introverted. Sandy Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Research program, has focused his work on that unlikely task: using gadgets as simple as a cell phone to better understand the quirks and patterns of human behavior.

In his most recent experiments, however, the sociometer hasn't been necessary. Instead, Pentland has tracked his subjects through their cell phones, which are carried by around four out of five Americans. Pentland spoke with Forbes.com about the benefits his tracking experiments could offer to society, the privacy problems they pose and how he hopes to strike a balance between the two.

What Your Cell Phone Knows About You - Forbes.com

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