Blog: David Loshin

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Overloading Signals...

I had heard about this overloaded use of technology a few years back, but a few conversations last week at TDWI reminded me of an interesting exploitation of one technology to provide a service completely unrelated to the technology's original intent. This article from last October describes how one can use cell phone monitoring to track traffic patterns through highly-traveled routes.

Basically, the way mobile phones work is that they transmit and receive signals from particular antenna towers scattered across the region. As you are traveling, the mobile phone sends a message to establish its appearance within the nearest tower's range. As your phone leaves that tower's area, it will connect with another tower. As you can guess, one can calculate relative rates of speed by looking at the timestamps at which the same phone registers itself with a series of towers. When the reference space includes towers along an interstate highway, averaging those durations over a number of cell phones allows one to get an idea of how fast traffic is moving along different sections of the highway. That information can be routed back to subscribers (individuals or even news sites) to help in relieving congestion.

According to the article, a number of localities have, or are interested in deploying these kinds of systems. Is this a public service piggy-backed on harmless data collection, or a potential invasion of privacy... let me know what you think?

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