My good friend Steve found this very interesting article and interactive map from the German Zeit website. We all probably all know that in just living our lives we leave a trail of data within the organisations and locations we encounter along the way. It’s a familiar enough site in movies or in CSI for the cops to track a bad guy’s location from his mobile phone or credit card, but just what all this data could look like if pulled together is a bit of a mystery.
To try and demonstrate this Malte Spitz from the German Green Party decided to obtain and publish the data that Deutsche Telekom collected about him between 2009 and 2010. This data was then added to other publically available information from places like Twitter and his blog to add a further a layer of context. This combined data has then been visualised in an interactive map that show’s his life between August 2009 and February 2010.
It’s almost obvious that all this data might be out there somewhere, but seeing it pulled together so effectively is good reminder of how well instrumented our lives are these days, whether we know about it or not.
Check out the article here, and the map itself here (there’s an English link at the top right).