“With 4 billion handsets in use worldwide, that makes for trillions of data points flowing through…”

“With 4 billion handsets in use worldwide, that makes for trillions of data points flowing through the network every month and creating digital graphs of our paths through time and space. When aggregated, those individual paths convey a picture of a block, a community, a city—even a whole society. As Sandy Pentland, a professor at MIT’s Media Lab, puts it, our cell phones have become the neurons in “an emerging—and truly global—nervous system.””

Businesses Probe Cell-Phone Location Data | Newsweek International Edition | Newsweek.com

“With 4 billion handsets in use worldwide, that makes for trillions of data points flowing through the network every month and creating digital graphs of our paths through time and space. When aggregated, those individual paths convey a picture of a block, a community, a city—even a whole society. As Sandy Pentland, a professor at MIT’s Media Lab, puts it, our cell phones have become the neurons in “an emerging—and truly global—nervous system.””

Businesses Probe Cell-Phone Location Data | Newsweek International Edition | Newsweek.com