Be good for goodness’ sake. Or maybe out of fear of being watched.

A while back I posted about being able to track people using their cell phones. Well, some scientists did a study doing that very thing — “Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns” using cell phone signals.

The location of cell phone users was located every time they received or initiated a call or a text message, allowing Barabási and his team to reconstruct the user’s time-resolved trajectory. In order to make sure that the findings were not affected by an irregular call pattern, the researchers also studied the data set that captured the location of 206 cell phone users, recorded every two hours for an entire week. The two data sets showed similar results, the second validating the first.

No need to have the NSA insert that GPS transponder chip under your skin, after all.

Physics Buzz ponders the ethics of the study