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FLORHAM PARK — You probably don't know this, but there are people studying where you work and how you get there, how long you're stuck in traffic and what red lights you avoid.

And it’s all coming from your cell phone.

At AT&T Labs in Florham Park, a team of researchers is working to turn data collected through the company’s cellular network into a trove of information for policymakers, urban planners and traffic engineers.

Morristown has become the laboratory for the telecommunication giant’s experiment in "big data" — the massive amounts of information we unwittingly share every day that can reveal minute details of our lives.

"The fact that we are all carrying these sensors on our bodies now in the form of cell phones … I think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface as to what that might mean," said Philip Abramson, a project manager with Jonathan Rose Cos., a Manhattan firm specializing in urban planning. "If we can get this data on a large scale, it’s better than anything else that we have, and it’s cheaper to produce."

AT&T may be the latest company to try to mine data from our cell phones, but it is hardly alone. Verizon has also started looking for a way to make money off the location data of its customers. Google tracks smart-phone owners to instantly spot traffic snarls for its maps. And an English company has begun watching the movement of shoppers through malls using the wireless internet signals picked up by cell phones.

There is a glut of information valuable to retailers and planners alike that companies hope to extract from our phones. But this technological innovation also brings privacy concerns as companies become more inventive in watching nearly every move we make while we remain unaware we are being followed.

"As more and more data goes online, it will be easier to collect and amass profiles about people," said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "The ability to understand it and to generate knowledge from it is just beginning to catch up now.

"Putting the appropriate privacy protections in place may make it slightly less useful," he said. "But I think it’s worth it."

The researchers at AT&T Labs agree. Chris Volinsky, director of the statistics research department there, said they hope that by analyzing how and where customers use their phones they can help government agencies plan infrastructure and tailor public services.

"We wanted to look at ways that we could use this data in a positive way to make cities more sustainable and efficient," Volinsky said. "This was an example of the use of the data that maybe people didn’t think that we could do."

Volinsky and his team have mapped the movement of workers in and out of Morristown each day — as well as the arrival and departure of crowds who frequent bars and restaurants at night — by isolating cell-phone users who make calls in the town at certain times throughout the week.

What the team ended up with was a clear snapshot of where Morristown’s labor pool lives and where its late-night revelers go when the bars close. Roughly 41 million phone calls and text messages laid out on a map show trends not readily apparent: Workers commute from as far east as Queens, and Morristown’s nightlife draws people not only from North Jersey, but from Brooklyn as well.

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The researchers can see how the city changes hourly by looking at calls and text messages relayed through cell towers around the region, noting that certain towers see more activity at different times. For example, the tower pointed at Morristown’s entertainment district sees an uptick in activity at 2 a.m., when the bars close, which suggests late-night revelers are coordinating rides home, Volinsky said.

"If we know where the people who are done drinking need to get home to, maybe we can use that data to provide public transportation," Volinsky said.

Researchers also used records from the towers to watch how AT&T customers travel into the area. As a phone moves through a region, it leapfrogs from tower to tower to maintain the best possible reception. Each time a phone connects to a tower, it leaves a record of its connection, allowing the team to track it.

"You can see the patterns that people use in order to get into the city," Volinsky said. "We can see how those paths ebb and flow and how they change from day to day."

AT&T began looking at new applications for its data about a year and a half ago, Volinsky said. But the team wanted to find a use for the data that benefited society, rather than for marketing. The Morristown project is only in the experimental stages, but AT&T is looking at how it can turn the information collected from customers every day into another source of revenue.

Volinsky’s team’s research will give Morristown access to a wealth of real-time data, and officials there hope it will help them answer questions about infrastructure, housing and zoning, as well as transportation. The patterns of how people move between cities will also help in coordinating with neighboring municipalities, said town administrator Michael Rogers.

AT&T says the information culled by the research team is anonymous and covered under the company’s terms of service. Researchers do not listen to any calls or read messages, and Volinsky said any reference to individual cell-phone owners has been scrubbed from the database to protect the customers’ privacy. Individual records are not available to Morristown officials or their contractors, he added.

"We don’t care who the people are who are making the calls," Volinsky said. "We just want to look at the trajectory of the phones. Any information about a single phone call or a small number of phone calls would never leave our hands."

Watching how people move through a region — mobility tracking — is a tool commonly used by urban planners in Europe and is gaining popularity in the United States.

In New York City, transportation engineers keep an eye on taxis and how fast they move through the boroughs. The information is collected from the credit-card machines in all yellow taxicabs, which contain GPS units normally meant to track fares and keep a log of business. Officials have been gathering data from these units since 2009, recording roughly 13 million taxi trips a month.

GPS giants TomTom and Navteq — the mapmaker behind Garmin and the GPS units built into many cars — are also trying to harness the value of their data by selling it to government agencies. TomTom has been collecting information on its customers since 2006, and a promotional video marketing the data says the company receives billions of measurements each day.

Verizon recently updated its privacy policy to allow the use of its data for other purposes, but it has not revealed any plans publicly to do so. Google collects the location and speed of travel of people who use its maps on GPS-enabled phones. That information is aggregated and laid out on Google Maps as part of the live traffic feed.

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And on a smaller level, malls in the United Kingdom and Australia have begun tracking their shoppers using Wi-Fi connections, a program that was tested in two U.S. malls — one in California and another in Virginia — during last year’s holiday season.

AT&T’s data, which does not include GPS locations, could serve a similar purpose by exposing weaknesses in existing traffic systems. A new traffic light or construction detour can have rippling effects throughout a region; a snarl in traffic can cause problems elsewhere in the system.

"That is a very hard thing to measure unless you have large sophisticated data sets and sophisticated analytical techniques to look for these minute changes in usage patterns," said Abramson, whose firm oversees planning for Morristown and is working with the AT&T prototype data.

But privacy advocates worry information about people will be exposed, despite measures taken to protect consumers.

" ‘Big data’ is the mantra right now. Everyone wants to go there, and everyone has these stories about how it might benefit us," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization specializing in free speech, privacy and consumer rights.

"One of the things you learn in kindergarten is that if you want to play with somebody else’s toys, you ask them," Tien said. "What is distressing, and I think sad, about the big data appetite is so often it is essentially saying, ‘Hey, we don’t have to ask.’ "

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