Research news: Tiny ring around the callers: Study shows few venture far from home

The News:
Tiny ring around the callers: Study shows few venture far from home
By The Associated Press
Article Last Updated: 06/04/2008 09:15:48 PM MDT
WASHINGTON — Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the U.S. through their cellphone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.
The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.
It also yielded somewhat surprising results that reveal how little people move around in their daily lives. Nearly three- quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-diameter circle for half a year.
The scientists would not say where the study was done, describing the location only as an industrialized nation.
Researchers used cellphone 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 206 cellphones that had tracking devices and got their locations every two hours for a week.
The study was based on cellphone records from a private company, whose name also was not disclosed. Study co-author Cesar Hidalgo, a physics researcher at Northeastern, said he and his colleagues didn't know the individual phone numbers.
That type of nonconsensual tracking would be illegal in the United States, according to Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission. Consensual tracking, however, is legal and even marketed as a special feature by some U.S. cellphone providers.
The study, published today in Nature, opens up the field of human-tracking for science and calls attention to what experts said is an emerging issue of locational privacy. Read on...

The Research:
Read the research behind this story in the journal Nature.