Curt,
The idea that the idea to preserve people's privacy by changing IDs daily
seems right on. After all for most market research applications I can think
of, the individual data would be of no use. The use of qualitative data and
data mining to allows the researchers to identify trends and patterns should
be enough.
I do not see these applications as groundbreaking but they allow a little
neat business to grow. I mentioned Telephia here in San Francisco. Their
customers are the mobile operators themselves eager to get an independent
estimate of their competitions numbers from another source. A small company
could sell its services to municipalities and commercial real estate
developers. It could provide information on traffic flows and where are
customers coming from.
For example if the administrators of a department store in a particular mall
find out the routes that shoppers use to get to the mall, they may be able
to do targeted advertising with billboards along those routes (just an
idea). Also, city planners may use the services to base decisions on new
public transport lines. It could tell a developer how "hot" is a particular
area.
On the other hand if a company knew my phone number etc. and how many times
I have traveled to a particular holiday resort, then I would have hordes of
telemarketers calling me to sell timeshares.
Jorge
On Thu, 5 Nov 2001, "Curt Sampson" <cjs@cynic.net> wrote:
>
> Um...a trace of someone's movements is exactly the info you need to trace
> back to an individual, if you just follow the individual around for a day
> (or perhaps even a few hours). In order for privacy to be preserved, the
> identifier would have to be changed at frequent intervals, probably daily.
>
> There are probably tricks you could use to get this information even
> without following someone. If you simply a know a few places they go to
> during certain times during the day (e.g., know where they live, where
> they work, and invite them to something that would cause them to visit
> a third place they don't normally go) you could likely find the user's
> trace amongst all of the traces for a day.
>
> cjs
> --
> Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 http://www.netbsd.org
> Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
>
>
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Received on Tue Nov 6 03:31:29 2001