A British research group has developed software that can predict, within 20 meters, where you will be 24 hours from now.

It’s actually surprisingly easy to predict your general, routine movements — home, car, office, lunch, car, home — but it has always been nigh impossible to predict breaks in routine, such as a trip to the cinema or a holiday abroad.

The researchers, Mirco Musolesi, Manlio Domenico, and Antonio Lima of the University of Birmingham, cracked this problem by factoring in the location of your friends and your social interactions with those friends (phone calls, meet-ups, etc.) By simply analyzing how many calls you make to a friend, and by correlating your movement patterns, the researchers can predict your movements over the next 24 hours — even if you deviate dramatically from routine.

The repercussions of such an algorithm are immense, with possible applications that range from awesome to terrifying. On the relatively benign side of things, you can imagine a version of Google Now that knows where you will be tomorrow, and offers up suggestions for which clothes to wear, which other friends will be in the area, and where you should eat (plus a coupon, if the restaurant is one of Google’s partner). This application of the algorithm would be opt-in — if you want to enjoy the services that Google can provide by knowing your predicted location, then that’s your choice.

On the nefarious end of the spectrum, though, this algorithm could be the cornerstone of a Precrime Police Division, a la Minority Report. Precrime would track the location of known criminals via their smartphones, and put a tap on their calls to correlate their movements with their friends/known associates. Very quickly, the Precrime Police could create a map of where every criminal will be in the next 24 hours. It would probably be difficult to predict actual crimes, but at least you’d know where to station your cops.

It’s worth noting that some police departments are already doing something similar, but on a much broader scale: They’re collating all of the reports and arrests in their database, and then plotting them on a map to see where crime is most likely to occur on any given day. In regions where police forces are being downsized, technology will become increasingly important as a force amplifier — and eventually, I wouldn’t be surprised if a real, per-criminal precrime system is deployed.

Research paper: Interdependence and Predictability of Human Mobility and Social Interactions