As promised, I've been digging into the mini poo storm over the Barabási study that tracked the movement patterns of several thousand unsuspecting Europeans, and it's looking very much to me like Barabási and his team are unfortunate victims of our current cultural and legal confusion over just how we're supposed to think of the location information our personal mobile devices are constantly beaming out into the ether. A story on the controversy in the school newspaper at Northeastern, the home university for the study, makes a good point: MIT recently used the AT&T call and IP records of New Yorkers to generate maps that were considered beautiful enough to be hung in the Museum of Modern Art. No one seems to have bat an eye over that use of location data. But something about the Barabási's study rubbed people the wrong way, and he and his team are finding their work caught in the thicket of consumer uncomfortability with the idea that where we happen to be on the planet at any one moment is anything other than our own damn business.
I've just stumbled across a fascinating case: a group of researchers affiliated with Northeastern -- including Albert-László Barabási, the author of the network science book Linked -- have just published in Nature on a study where they partnered with a European cell phone service provider to get six months worth of data on the call and text message records of 100,000 customers. Getting insight into human behavior through non-consensual access to personal technologies like cell phones is groundbreaking research approach, in part because your research subjects can't adjust their behavior if they don't know they're involved in a study in the first place.
The Barabási study was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (though it's unclear what their interest is), but Barabási et al conducted the research outside the U.S. because it would be illegal to use call records the way they did here. Researchers didn't go through the university research ethics review process because the Navy had decided that it was a physics study didn't actually involve human subjects and, it seems, because the way the experiment was run it was anonymous. Even so, plenty of people are up in arms about what the study means for privacy, and both the school and the journal have tried to defend the study.
But let's get to the question I'm really interested in. What was tracked in the Barabási study were calls and text messages, which enjoy a certain level of protection in the U.S. But in the U.S. every mobile phone is required under e-911 legislation to be capable of sending back to the mothership a fairly accurate location read, within 150 yards most of the time. And now comes the next generation iPhone, equipped with assisted-GPS that pinpoints location using a powerful combination of true GPS (which alone is accurate, I think, within something like 30 feet), cell tower triangulation, and wifi location data.
An expert I recently grilled on the topic tells me that the law on location records in the U.S. -- separate and apart from call records -- is a matter of some controversy and is still fuzzy. If a U.S. company, either carrier or location-aware app provider like Loopt or BrightKite, wanted to work with researchers on a study like this that used location data, would that be illegal here? Will keep digging...
(Photo thx Vagamundos)
