"Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas". Examples include...
"The technology is probably the easy part, however. For global networks of mobile sensors to provide useful insights, technology firms, governments, aid organisations and individuals will have to find ways to address concerns over privacy, accuracy, ownership and sovereignty. Only if they do so will it be possible to tap the gold mine of information inside the world’s billions of mobile phones."
Source: The Economist, 4 June 2009, p. 25-26.
- Non-profit Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters. This group has released open-source software which provides a central number for users to text in, which then appears on a map enabling "geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data".
- Passive data collection from mobile phones or the network operators could be used for commercial purposes such as identifying the most popular venues or optimizing pedestrian flow.
"The technology is probably the easy part, however. For global networks of mobile sensors to provide useful insights, technology firms, governments, aid organisations and individuals will have to find ways to address concerns over privacy, accuracy, ownership and sovereignty. Only if they do so will it be possible to tap the gold mine of information inside the world’s billions of mobile phones."
Source: The Economist, 4 June 2009, p. 25-26.
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