Kind of Creepy

You have to love a software program called Creepy. It is even better if its purpose is to highlight the ability to aggregate someone's location information based on their tweets and Flickr photo uploads.

The goal of its creator Yiannis Kakavas is to both raise people's awareness about how much information they are giving out and provide researchers with a nifty tool.

We downloaded the application and played around with a bit but the results were a bit disappointing. Our twitter ID, Floating_sheep had no geographic references (which incidentally was a conscious choice on Taylor's part) and the other twitter IDs we tried didn't have much geo-information either. We never ran it on Flickr data but suspect that the geo-information would be a lot richer.

In any case, give it a try and don't forget to invest in tin foil futures.

Location Tracking Via Cell Phones

There is a nice article in the NY Times on how cell phone records provide extremely detailed records of spatial location.

The key thing here is that this information is constantly collected. In order for a cell phone to work properly it needs to know which cell tower is closest and will provide the strongest signal.

This does not require that the user do anything (accept a cookie, turn on GPS tracking, etc.) but have a phone with them.

This is something that we've known for a long time but this is a nice and easily accessible article (i.e., great for teaching) on the topic.



The newspaper Die Zeit made a great visualization of the location information for Mark Spitz (a Green Party politician). Well worth checking out. It is in German. Here's the same page embedded in Google Translate from German to English.