Real-Time Population Estimates from Anonymized Cellphone Signaling Data

[pizzaboy]

If these data are publicly available, they would surely be useful for maximizing the population captured within a kill-radius of civilians. Aren't you glad the cell phone companies share this info? This data is real-time, which makes it potentially dangerous, say, for suicide bombers ala Israel, targeted attacks ala the IRA, so called "dirty bombs

Comments

[octotoes]

That's fascinating, although I can't as you mentioned it seems the information would probably cause more harm than good.

Recently I've been most impressed by the WarnMe and other various programs that have sprung up to protect those on college campuses, etc in the event of crisis. The Berkeley system hasn't been put to use yet, but the test runs have gone amazingly well and tens of thousands have signed up for notifications. I'm surprised it took so long for this step in technology to come about, particularly for a campus that rests on a fault line.

[pizzaboy]

Well, although the real-time GPS tracking of people is fiction, this is quite real (unless they have a GPS transmitter, although a cell phone could be used as one in combination). Personally, I'm not scared of terrorism one bit, but this struck me as particularly obvious, and not one person mentioned it, just hailed the technology. One could easily put together some extremely dangerous information, relay that information to another person, bent on doing ill will, were one so inclined. As geospatial tech becomes more mainstream, faster, easier to use, and even more powerful, its interesting to see the effects. It's democratizing in many ways, and often usurps the power of governments, who try to fight it and control it. Area 51 can no longer be denied, Russian nuke sites are now known to the public, etc. I find it extremely interesting stuff.

[octotoes]

My favorite is the base in Pakistan that the gov't (well....besides Nancy Pelozzi) swore did not exist, and then it turned up on Google maps.

[pizzaboy]

interesting...got the lat/long?