The "wisdom of crowds" -- employing the opinions of large numbers of people -- has become a tremendously popular concept used for the growing number of Web services that rely on user recommendations. The wisdom of wireless crowds, as I’m describing it, is different. In this new wireless group, “wisdom” potentially has valuable uses.

The wisdom of wireless crowds is the collection of telemetry and individual data points -- not personal opinions -- from multiple cellular phones and wireless devices in an attempt to uncover or analyze a situation, such as the location of radioactive weapons, air pollution levels, and subscriber travel habits. It’s also different in another way: An organization could be conducting this group data mining without the miners being aware of it. It has raised privacy concerns, and the debate isn’t going to stop.

Read the rest of the story at Internet Evolution.

— Alan Reiter, President, Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing