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WHAT THEY KNOW APRIL 23, 2011

The Really Smart Phone

Researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data,
uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our
political views.
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Apple and Google may be intensifying privacy

concerns by tracking where and when people use
their mobile phones—but the true future of
consumer surveillance is taking shape inside the
cellphones at a weather-stained apartment
complex in Cambridge, Mass.

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked
60 families living in campus quarters via sensors
and software on their smartphones—recording
their movements, relationships, moods, health,
calling habits and spending. In this wealth of
intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human
behavior that could reveal how millions of people
interact at home, work and play.

Through these and other cellphone research

projects, scientists are able to pinpoint
"influencers," the people most likely to make
Photo-illustration by Adam Magyar
others change their minds. The data can predict
'Phones can know,' says an MIT researcher. 'People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior.'
with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to
be at any given time in the future. Cellphone
companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer's social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to
other carriers.

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones
Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community
much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed
a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.

A wave of ambitious social-network experiments is
underway in the U.S. and Europe to track our
movements, probe our relationships and, ultimately,
affect the individual choices we all make. WSJ's Robert
Lee Hotz reports.
And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election
were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers
didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and
communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students
themselves realized they were getting sick.
"Phones can know," said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, who
helped pioneer the research. "People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior."

So far, these studies only scratch the surface of human complexity. Researchers are already exploring ways that the information gleaned from
mobile phones can improve public health, urban planning and marketing. At the same time, researchers believe their findings hint at basic rules of
human interaction, and that poses new challenges to notions of privacy.

"We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable," said Johan Bollen, an expert in complex networks at Indiana University. "These
regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for."

Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone. That activity generates immense commercial databases that reveal the
ways we arrange ourselves into networks of power, money, love and trust. The patterns allow researchers to see past our individual differences to
forms of behavior that shape us in common.

As a tool for field research, the cellphone is unique. Unlike a conventional land-line telephone, a mobile phone usually is used by only one person,
and it stays with that person everywhere, throughout the day. Phone companies routinely track a handset's location (in part to connect it to the
nearest cellphone tower) along with the timing and duration of phone calls and the user's billing address.

Typically, the handset logs calling data, messaging activity, search requests and online activities. Many smartphones also come equipped with
sensors to record movements, sense its proximity to other people with phones, detect light levels, and take pictures or video. It usually also has a

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compass, a gyroscope and an accelerometer to sense rotation and direction.

Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the
What They Know
tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means. At Northeastern
A Wall Street Journal investigation into the world
of digital privacy.
University in Boston, network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by
studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users.
The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
Sites Feed Personal Details To New Tracking After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the researchers
Industry
determined that, taken together, people's movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern.
On Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name
Only
The scientists said that, with enough information about past movements, they could forecast
someone's future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy.

The pattern held true whether people stayed close to home or traveled widely, and wasn't affected by the phone user's age or gender.

"For us, people look like little particles that move in space and that occasionally communicate with each other," said Northeastern physicist Albert-
Laszlo Barabasi, who led the experiment. "We have turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be objectively followed."

Only recently have academics had the opportunity to study commercial cellphone data. Until recently, most cellphone providers saw little value in
mining their own data for social relationships, researchers say. That's now changing, although privacy laws restrict how the companies can share
their records.

Several cellphone companies in Europe and Africa lately have donated large blocks of calling records for research use, with people's names and
personal details stripped out.

"For the scientific purpose, we don't care who the people are," said medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University, who is using
phone data to study how diseases, behavior and ideas spread through social networks, and how companies can use these webs of relationships to
influence drug marketing and health-care decisions.

His work focuses on "social contagion"—the idea that our relationships with people around us, which are readily mapped through cellphone usage,
shape our behavior in sometimes unexpected ways. By his calculation, for instance, obesity is contagious. So is loneliness.

Even though the cellphone databases are described as anonymous, they can contain revealing personal details when paired with other data. A
recent lawsuit in Germany offered a rare glimpse of routine phone tracking. Malte Spitz, a Green party politician, sued Deutsche Telekom to see
his own records as part of an effort by Mr. Spitz to highlight privacy issues.

In a six-month period, the phone company had recorded Mr. Spitz's location more than 35,000 times, according to data Mr. Spitz released in
March. By combining the phone data with public records, the news site Zeit Online reconstructed his daily travels for months.

In recent days, Apple Inc. triggered privacy alarms with the news that its iPhones automatically
Read More
keep a database of the phone's location stretching back for months. On Friday, The Wall Street
Our Social Networks, Ourselves
Journal reported that both Apple and Google Inc. (maker of the Android phone operating system)
Google Defends Way It Gets Phone Data
go further than that and in fact collect location information from their smartphones. A test of one
Avoiding Mobile Trackers
Android phone showed that it recorded location data every few seconds and transmitted it back to
Google several times an hour.

Google and Apple have said the data transmitted by their phones is anonymous and users can turn off location sharing.

"We can quantify human movement on a scale that wasn't possible before," said Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New
Mexico who works with 220 mobile-phone companies in 80 countries. "I don't think anyone has a handle on all the ramifications." His largest
single research data set encompasses 500 million people in Latin America, Africa and Europe.

Among other things, Mr. Eagle has used the data to determine how slums can be a catalyst for a city's economic vitality. In short, slums provide
more opportunities for entrepreneurial activity than previously thought. Slums "are economic springboards," he said.

Cellphone providers are openly exploring other possibilities. By mining their calling records for social relationships among customers, several
European telephone companies discovered that people were five times more likely to switch carriers if a friend had already switched, said Mr.
Eagle, who works with the firms. The companies now selectively target people for special advertising based on friendships with people who
dropped the service.

At AT&T, a research team led by Ramon Caceres recently amassed millions of anonymous call records from hundreds of thousands of
mobile-phone subscribers in New York and Los Angeles to compare commuting habits in the two metropolitan areas.

Dr. Caceres, a lead scientist at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J., wanted to gauge the potential for energy conservation and urban planning. "If we
can prove the worth of this work, you can think of doing it for all the world's billions of phones," he said.

Thousands of smartphone applications, or "apps," already take advantage of a user's location data to forecast traffic congestion, rate restaurants,
share experiences and pictures, or localize radio channels. Atlanta-based AirSage Inc. routinely tracks the movements of millions of cellphones to
generate live traffic reports in 127 U.S. cities, processing billions of anonymous data points about location every day.

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As more people access the Internet through their phones, the digital universe of personal detail
funneled through these handsets is expanding rapidly, and so are ways researchers can use the
information to gauge behavior. Dr. Bollen and his colleagues, for example, found that the millions
of Twitter messages sent via mobile phones and computers every day captured swings in national
mood that presaged changes in the Dow Jones index up to six days in advance with 87.6%
accuracy.

M. Scott Brauer for The Wall Street Journal
Alex Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics
Laboratory, above. Using location data, he said, 'I can
say a lot about the music you like...your financial
risks.'
The researchers analyzed the emotional content of words used in 9.7 million of the terse
140-character text messages posted by 2.7 million tweeters between March and December 2008.
As Twitter goes, so goes the stock market, the scientists found.
"It is not just about observing what is happening; it is about shaping what is happening," said Dr.
Bollen. "The patterns are allowing us to learn how to better manipulate trends, opinions and mass
psychology."

What Phones Know
One study found that the U.K.'s happiest time is
8 p.m. Saturday; its unhappiest day is Tuesday.
European phone companies discovered their
customers were five times more likely to switch
carriers if friends had switched, allowing the
companies to target their ads.
Another study was able to determine that two
people were talking about politics—without the
researchers hearing the call
Some scientists are taking advantage of the smartphone's expanding capabilities to design
Android and iPhone apps, which they give away, to gather personal data. In this way,
environmental economist George MacKerron at the London School of Economics recruited
40,000 volunteers through an iPhone app he designed, called Mappiness, to measure emotions in
the U.K.
At random moments every day, his iPhone app prompts the users to report their moods, activities,
and surroundings. The phone also automatically relays the GPS coordinates of the user's location
and rates nearby noise levels by using the unit's microphone. It asks permission to photograph the
locale.

By early April, volunteers had filed over two million mood reports and 200,000 photographs.

Publicly, Mr. MacKerron uses their data to chart the hour-by-hour happiness level of London and other U.K. cities on his website. By his measure,
the U.K.'s happiest time is 8 p.m. Saturday; its unhappiest day is Tuesday.

Perhaps less surprisingly, people are happiest when they are making love and most miserable when sick in bed. The most despondent place in the
U.K. is an hour or so west of London, in a town called Slough.

On a more scholarly level, Mr. MacKerron is collecting the information to study the relationship between moods, communities and the places
people spend time. To that end, Mr. MacKerron expects to link the information to weather reports, online mapping systems and demographics
databases.

Several marketing companies have contacted him to learn whether his cellphone software could help them find out how people feel when they are,
for instance, near advertising billboards or listening to commercial radio, he said.

Mr. MacKerron said he's tempted—but has promised his users that their personal information will be used only for scholarly research. "There is a
phenomenal amount of data we can collect with very little effort," he said.

Some university researchers have begun trolling anonymous billing records encompassing entire countries. When mathematician Vincent Blondel
studied the location and billing data from one billion cellphone calls in Belgium, he found himself documenting a divide that has threatened his
country's ability to govern itself.

Split by linguistic differences between a Flemish-speaking north and a French-speaking south, voters in Belgium set a world record this year, by
being unable to agree on a formal government since holding elections last June. Belgium's political deadlock broke a record previously held by
Iraq.

The calling patterns from 600 towns revealed that the two groups almost never talked to each other, even when they were neighbors.

This social impasse, as reflected in relationships documented by calling records, "had an impact on the political life and the discussions about
forming a government," said Dr. Blondel at the Catholic University of Louvain near Brussels, who led the research effort.

The MIT smartphone experiment is designed to delve as deeply as possible into daily life. For his work, Dr. Pentland gave volunteers free Android
smartphones equipped with software that automatically logged their activities and their proximity to other people. The participants also filed
reports on their health, weight, eating habits, opinions, purchases and other personal information, so the researchers could match the phone data
to relationships and behavior.

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The current work builds on his earlier experiments, beginning in 2004,

conducted in an MIT dormitory that explored how relationships influence
behavior, health, eating habits and political views. Dr. Pentland and his
colleagues used smartphones equipped with research software and sensors
to track face-to-face encounters among 78 college students in a dorm during
the final three months of the 2008 presidential election.

Every six minutes, each student's phone scanned for any other phone within
10 feet, as a way to identify face-to-face meetings. Among other things, each
phone also reported its location and compiled an anonymous log of calls
and text messages every 20 minutes. All told, the researchers compiled
320,000 hours of data about the students' behavior and relationships,
buttressed by detailed surveys.

"Just by watching where you spend time, I can say a lot about the music you
like, the car you drive, your financial risk, your risk for diabetes. If you add
financial data, you get an even greater insight," said Dr. Pentland. "We are
trying to understand the molecules of behavior in this really complete way."

Almost a third of the students changed their political opinions during the
three months. Their changing political ideas were related to face-to-face
contact with project participants of differing views, rather than to friends or
traditional campaign advertising, the analysis showed.

"We can measure their daily exposure to political opinions," said project scientist Anmol Madan at MIT's Media Lab. "Maybe one day, you would
be able to download a phone app to measure how much Republican or Democratic exposure you are getting and, depending on what side you're
on, give you a warning."

As a reward when the experiment was done, the students were allowed to keep the smartphones used to monitor them.

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

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