Reality mining

Everytime you make a phonecall, data is collected about you. The phone company keeps track of the duration and frequency of conversations. Perhaps you have GPS on your device and use Google Maps, thus your location can be traced. It is also possible that your internet usage is tracked. Companies can use this data to improve their products and to anticipate on the actions of their users.

Datamining is the direct search for (statistical) relationships within large sets of data, for scientific or commercial purposes. Patterns in datasets can be found to a)classify information, b) detect dangerous activities or c) learn from it. The interest in datamining is increasing, which is particularly due to the growing databases. I never realized datamining was so huge, until we had a guest lecture by Eric Postma last week, in the course Business Information Technology.

There are many methods for datamining, and one of them is Reality mining. Reality mining is the collection and analysis of realtime data of human social behavior. The goal is to identify predictable patterns in human behavior. An example is location mining, by which an organization keeps track of the location of employees with the use of GPS.
According to Technology Review Magazine, Reality mining is one of the "10 technologies most likely to change the way we live".

Obviously, privacy is an issue for these new techniques. It is important to know who receives the data and what they do with it. It is highly undesirable if everyone can access the phone conversations you make! However, if well used, these techniques can have great advantages. It could make life much easier when patterns in live are found and organizations can anticipate on this by, for example, automatically notifying people or automatic privacy settings.
Another example is that researchers of Microsoft are mining cabs to create faster driving paths for online maps. As you can see, the possibilities are endless, if the data is used well!