SkyHook Wireless is sitting on the greatest behavioral corpus known to man. This software that powers the location based services for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch is a self-learning map of wireless access point to GPS locations. They seeded this database over the past several years by war driving across the US and recording the ESSIDs and MAC addresses of wireless access points and GPS locations of all the exposed wireless networks they found. iPhone and iPod Touch users can find their current location by finding all the wifi networks they currently have in range and sending that information to SkyHook. SkyHook can then look up their current location based on networks it knows about, and record information about new networks it may not have seen before.
This last point is important: users are actively scanning local airwaves and sending this information to SkyHook. Cellular network operators have long been able to track movements of individuals, but they only have visibility of the people connected to their own network. SkyHook is retaining information from an active scan. Now you not only get information about a users’ current location, but also the location of ajacent users not connected to your network.
It may not be obvious how this data can be used for behavioral analysis, so I’ll present this scenario. Sally takes the train to work every day and has no knowledge of the SkyHook service. She reads her email on the platform by picking up a local wifi hotspot. This same train platform is periodically populated by tourists that are using the SkyHook service to map out their day. SkyHook is now receiving active scans of this train station and seeing Sally’s wifi radio talking to the hotspot. When Sally goes to get coffee later in the afternoon, her phone is detected by another SkyHook user and her location again entered into the SkyHook database. It’s now possible for SkyHook to see that Sally stops at the same train platform at around 7:30am each day and gets coffee on 4th St. on Tuesdays, even though Sally has never used or heard of the SkyHook service.
If we presume that connecting to a network and using a service constitutes an agreement between user and provider, then the provider has some reason to know your location. If the person sitting next to me on the train belongs to a different network, my network doesn’t know anything about and has no agreement with that individual. If my phone is running an active scan and finds the person next to me and sends this information to my network operator, who owns this information? Do I have the right to send someone else’s location to a third party? Is my location information public domain?
I see SkyHook as a potential disruptive technology that has yet to be challenged in court. How long will it take before this information is considered valuable in a court case and Skyhook subpoenaed for probable suspects?