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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

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).

Privacy in LBS

Thus far, the focus has been on gathering data. But the ability of a given device to locate itself suggests that this information can be used to provide services to the person carrying the device. For example, many such Location Based Service (LBS) inform the person carrying the device when a preidentified friend is nearby.

Although LBS applications rely on information on the user's whereabouts, there is a concern with privacy protection in LBS. So, for example, Yahoo's Fire Eagle and Google's Latitude allows users to control the level of location detail revealed to various parties.

Notably, the method presented here might have a role there, as people may be more willing to share information on their location when they are in a public place. So, for example, a service using this method could offer choices more refined than Fire Eagle or Latitude's "show my exact location,"show my city only", and "show nothing."

 

Location and Web Search

As discussed, Google took some heat for retaining search records with IP addresses. While that issue may have passed, there would almost certainly be some backlash if any search engine added to IP logs, information on the location of the mobile device requesting the search; in addition to being intrusive in themselves, the location records would make it possible to identify the person carrying the mobile device, and to link that identity with the heretofore anonymous search record. However, the privacy problem inherent in location data would be considerably diminished if the location information were anonymized in real time.