Mobile phone users follow the same power-law

Illustration by Lars Wannop (Fabrica)

We all have had a feeling that someone was tracking us at least once. All the technology around us can always reveal our movements and actions.
This kind of Big Brother is a sort of paranoia for me, because we use to believe that our lives are “special” and different from the others’ ones, and we don’t want any other to discover what we are doing.
(Even if I don’t have anything to keep hidden!)

But we are not that original, a study suggest.

More than 100,000 mobile phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements.

The results? Same habits for mobile phone users.
People’s movements were not as random as predicted: most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law, moving less than 10km on a regular basis, according to the study published in the journal Nature.

“This intrinsic similarity between individuals is very exciting and it has practical applications,” said Professor Barabasi.
As I read this sentence I got a bit worried… what kind of practical applications are they talking about?!
For example Professor John Cleland of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Disease (LSHTM) said the study could be of use to people monitoring the spread of contagious diseases, thanks to similar models for humans’ movements.

That could be a good reason to keep my daily movements monotonous. But I still imagine researchers’ maps monitoring us, miserable mobile users represented by red dots, going there and then coming back, going there, and then coming back, there again, and then coming back…

Filed Under Media & Society, Modern Life, Research, Technology