Secret Monitoring Of Mobile Phone Owners-Part-1

In America, investigators secretly tracked locations of 100,000 individuals beyond boundary of United States through their mobile phones. This study brought them to a conclusion that most of them rarely stray more than couple of miles from their residence.
This unique study of new type performed by North-eastern University arouses privacy and ethical matters for its monitoring techniques. It would be contrary to law in United States. It also conceded many surprising outcomes. One of them is how little people travel from place to place in their daily routine lives. Almost three-quarters of those investigated individuals remained within 20-mile-wide area for a period of half of year. The scientists didn’t mention where this study was made. They just told about location which was an industrialized public area somewhere in America.
The scientists make use of a cell phone towers to monitor people's locations each time they had phone calls or text messages for six months. In another set of records, scientists monitored 206 mobile phones having built in tracking devices in them. They received records for their localities every two hours within a week. The research work was made on mobile phone records from a private company whose name was also not mentioned.
Cesar Hidalgo is a co-author of the research work published in magazine; he is a physics researcher at Northeastern. He told that he and his fellow scientists didn't know the people’s cell numbers. Reason is that they were made unrecognizable into 26-digit-and-letter codes. Such kind of nonconsensual monitoring would be contrary to law in United States, stated by Rob Kenny, who is a spokesman for Federal Communications Commission. Consensual tracking is never allowed by official rules. It is also marketed as a special featuring technology by some U.S. mobile phone providers.
Research work was published in Journal Nature. It pioneers an area of human-tracking for scientific needs and calls attention to what people said is a major issue of privacy. This is a new breakthrough in science, stated by study co-author Albert-Lazlo Barabasi; he is a director of Northeastern's Center for Complex Network Research. He further said that this is for the first time in history that we have got a way to objectively go after different specific aspects of human attitudes.
Barabasi told that he spent nearly half of his time on this research. He remained worried about privacy matters. Investigators didn't know which phone numbers were monitored. They cannot tell precisely where individuals were present. They only told which closest mobile phone tower was controlling the calls. They began work from 6 million phone numbers and then selected 100,000.
Barabasi told that he did not examine with any ethics committee. Had he performed so, he could have received an earful, said by Arthur Caplan, who is a bioethicist at University of Pennsylvania. There is great deal going on here that arranges ethical alarm bells relating privacy and trustiness.