A group of researchers from Italy has conducted a research study to explore the social and economic makeup of various crowds. By doing so, they are hoping to understand the connections among the people in the crowd and determine the basic reason for the gathering of the group of people.
The group—comprised of Marco V. Barbera, Julinda Stefa, Alessandro Epasto, Alessandro Mei, and Vasile C. Perta—are from Sapienza Universita di Roma in Italy. The group spent three months doing their research, organizing the data and writing a paper that they presented to the Internet Measurement Conference 2013. They spent their three months gathering data is emitted from Wi-Fi devices (smartphones, tablets, and laptops) while searching for a connection to a wireless network. During that time, they gathered data of eleven million probes from 165,000 devices.
When a person tries to connect to the internet through Wi-Fi, they are searching for a “beacon” that is sent out from an Internet access point. When a smartphone tries to access a Wi-Fi network, it sends out a probe to what networks are within range of the phone. The phone, then, portrays a list of available access points for the user to connect to. Often on the list, there a several points that are considered on a preferred network list (PNL), which means that the user has had success accessing that specific access point during a previous session. The preferred network list occurs because the user had the service set identifier (SSID), which acts much like a password, to a given access point. There are often networks available that do not have an SSID that anyone can access, and there are others on that list that are blocked until the proper SSID is entered.
The group was able to develop their data by determining the first three bytes of a Media Access Control (MAC) address of an access point with the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) of a smartphone. The group found that Blackberry devices were the most likely to divulge part of its PNL (92 percent), followed by HTC (55 percent), Sony (35 percent), Apple (News - Alert) (35 percent), Samsung (31 percent), and Nokia (13 percent).
The group says, “We can regard the PNL of a device as a list of significant places visited by the user—significant enough that the user spent some time to connect to the access point.” They explained, “the fact that two users share one or more SSIDs in the PNL of their devices should intuitively provide some information on the existence of a social relationship between the two."
The group was able to determine the languages that were being used to estimate where the people in the group may be from, and they could determine the smartphone brand to guesstimate the prosperity of the people in the group. If people are using Apple smartphones at a conservative gathering, compared to a general gathering at which the phone brands are more dispersed evenly, the researchers could assume that the people at the conservative gathering are more affluent than the general group.
This may prove to become a non-evasive way of measuring various factors in a group of people, but it will take more time to perfect this technique.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson