Am I living in a world where privacy doesn't matter? One where my right to do what I want within legal boundaries is stymied by the incorrigible desire to spy on me and know exactly what I'm doing at all times? One where the world is a big fish bowl and I'm swimming around trying desperately to find a private place?
It certainly looks that way.
A new study from Northeastern University secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States by monitoring their cell phone use and found that most people rarely travel more than a few miles from their home.
I'm not too sure why anyone really cares how far people travel from their homes, but this study does raise one important issue: Northeastern University researches tracked individuals without their knowledge with total disregard for privacy concerns. Obviously heeding the advice of legal counsel, the researchers conducted the study in "an industrialized nation" so they wouldn't be tracking US citizens while in the same country.
According to the Associated Press, "Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals' locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months. In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week's time period."
Unbelievable.
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