Euclid. “Path intelligence,” indeed « Adam Greenfield's Speedbird. I want you to go take a look at this Times Online piece, which comes my way via Chris Heathcote’s del.icio.us.
(If you’re in a hurry, the gist of it is that a UK-based company called Path Intelligence is using mobile-phone microtriangulation to pinpoint customer behavior inside malls.) I cannot imagine a better-timed demonstration of so many of the facets of so-called “reality mining” that concern me. The utility of gathering this information is clear, at least from the perspective of a retail establishment: A shopping mall could, for example, find out that 10,000 people were still in the store at 6pm, helping to make a case for longer opening hours, or that a majority of customers who visited Gap also went to [competitor] Next, which could useful for marketing purposes.
Get The Real Point of View. Www.bluetrace.eu/images/bluetrace_retail_v3.pdf. Mobility management. International Mobile Subscriber Identity. The International mobile Subscriber Identity or IMSI /ˈɪmziː/ is used to identify the user of a cellular network and is a unique identification associated with all cellular networks.
It is stored as a 64 bit field and is sent by the phone to the network. It is also used for acquiring other details of the mobile in the home location register (HLR) or as locally copied in the visitor location register. To prevent eavesdroppers identifying and tracking the subscriber on the radio interface, the IMSI is sent as rarely as possible and a randomly generated TMSI is sent instead.