Smart Phone Sociology

“The Really Smart Phone” is the title of a really interesting article by Robert Lee Hotz, in the Saturday (4/22/11) issue of the Wall Street Journal.

The article goes deeper than the discussion of privacy issues we’re all reading about. Evidence is mounting through work being done at MIT and other places that the behavioral data derived from smart phones constitute a vast sociological map from which things like stock market trends, voting patterns and consumer trends, not to mention our personal behaviors can be predicted. The ramifications are not all clear, but this article is the ten thousand foot view, and worth a read.