Dev.SN

PhysOrg reports:

Every hour of every day cell phones are generating data which transportation planners, real estate developers, and investors use to help them to understand traffic flows, shopping patterns, and population shifts.

An Atlanta-based company, AirSage ( http://www.airsage.com ), collects real-time data (15 billion data points every day) from cell phone tower interactions - whenever a person sends a text, makes a phone call, or when a phone is searching for the next cell phone tower.

AirSage was one of the exhibitors at the annual Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington this week.

The company draws the data, which come from more than 100 million mobile devices, from two of the top three cell phone providers. The data cover more than a third of the U.S. population.

AirSage strips off personal data - "We don't know its Tom's phone," said Andrea Moe, AirSage's vice president of product management and marketing, "but we know it's a device and it has a unique identifier." She said the company does not look at individual devices but at large aggregations of data from many devices.

As a dataset it would be interesting to play with, and as a business move it's a clever way to monetize what you already have, but as a user it's disconcerting to know how granular tracking has become.