What is Reality-Mining? 

iPhones and Tom-Tom’s oh my!  As more and more hand held devices begin sharing data with each other and with the net, the ability to predict behavior becomes the next big thing for marketers, social networks and of course governments curious about citizens’ behaviors.

All of this falls under the rubric of “Reality Mining,” a term used to describe the marriage of GPS (global positioning systems) and large scale data mining. Pioneered by Sandy Pentland, a researcher at MIT whose work received funding from Nokia (the mobile phone handset manufacturer), the field shows great promise for those interested in predictive behavior.

By tracking physical location of the handset and hence its owner, proximity to contacts in the device address book which is a new feature in the forthcoming iPhone 2.0, and activity information such as motion or rest, a great deal of information can be gleaned.  Here are some examples all ready under way:

• “Will shoppers go out of their way to visit Starbucks? Or do they visit the closest coffee shop?”
  Product: Path Intelligence
• “I am downtown and it’s lunch time.  What good restaurants are nearby?
  “Product: Yelp Location Aware
• “I’ve got some free time.  I wonder where my friends are?”
  Product: BrightKite Social Networking

All of this begs the question of privacy, an area in which the United States seems to be trailing Europe.  Will users “opt-in” or will we rely upon the good intentions of the telco’s to scrub data clean of identifying information?  Or is privacy just a mirage, long since destroyed by the marriage of barcodes, traditional data-mining and putative “customer loyalty programs”?

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