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Purposes for which Inferior Data is Currently Used

• Retail site selection
• Transportation planning
• Profiling attendees at a mall or sporting event
• Monitoring audience for billboards
  

New Uses for a New Type of Data (i.e. anonymized individual tracks)

Putting clothes on the naked track
Because each track is anonymous, you can't use that data to target that single, specific person. However, you can use tracks to generalize about behavior of people from given neighborhoods. And, once you tie behavior to neighborhoods, you can use that info to target direct mail.

Getting a Handle on the Competition
As part of CRM, retailers use customer data to map the residences of their customers. This is guarded, proprietary information. But, with tracks, you can get a pretty good handle on the neighborhoods (and demographics) of those visiting your competitor's stores. This is not be as good as data on folks who actually made purchases there, but it is very useful for site selection, mailing, and targeted advertising.

Bootstrapping to demographics
In areas where detailed demographics are not available, tracks can be used to develop them. For example, folks shopping at high-end stores typically come from high-end neighborhoods.

Knowing where people are going
If you have demographically-keyed data on patterns in human movements, and you know where a given person is, then you can take a pretty good guess about where that person is going. So, if a subscriber has signed up for mobile Web, you could serve them an ad for the sale at the Nieman Marcus at the mall to which they are likely en route.

Identifying the shortcut
Everyone has their shortcuts. And tracks might reveal alternative, nonobvious routes which would make great (underpriced) retail or billboard locations.

Seeing paths shoppers take through a store
Would require a high sampling frequency and additional technology (e.g. a WiFi network in the store).

New Uses for a New Type of Privacy Protection

Privacy in Social Apps
Although social applications are intended to connect people with their friends, there is a concern for privacy because you wouldn't want all of your friends to be able to find out your exact location all of the time. So, for example, Google's Latitude allows users to control the level of location detail revealed to various parties.

However, Latitude's disclosure options are limited: "show my exact location,"show my city only", or "show nothing." With the method described here, it would be possible to add an option that incorporates a certain social intelligence -- "show my exact location when I am in public. Otherwise, be a little vague."

Privacy in Location-Aware Search and Browsing
Google Location Server enables location-aware search and browsing. And, so that the location information collected does not compromise users' privacy, Google aggregates individuals' location data, before using it for developmental purposes. But this aggregation involves considerable data loss, which could be avoided if the geographic data itself were anonymized by blurring nonpublic locations.

Do Not Call
Users might be more willing to agree to have special, location-based offers sent to their devices if they can indicate that they do not want to receive these offers when they are in their home or other nonpublic place.

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