The ever increasing ubiquitousness of WiFi access points, coupled with the diffusion of smartphones, suggest that Internet every time and everywhere will soon (if not already has) become a reality. Even in presence of 3G connectivity, our devices are built to switch automatically to WiFi networks so to improve user experience. Most of the times, this is achieved by recurrently broadcasting automatic connectivity requests (known as Probe Requests) to known access points (APs), like, e.g., "Home WiFi", "Campus WiFi", and so on. In a large gathering of people, the number of these probes can be very high. This scenario rises a natural question: "Can significant information on the social structure of a large crowd and on its socioeconomic status be inferred by looking at smartphone probes?". In this work we give a positive answer to this question. We organized a 3-months long campaign, through which we collected around 11M probes sent by more than 160K different devices. During the campaign we targeted national and international events that attracted large crowds as well as other gatherings of people. Then, we present a simple and automatic methodology to build the underlying social graph of the smartphone users, starting from their probes. We do so for each of our target events, and find that they all feature social-network properties. In addition, we show that, by looking at the probes in an event, we can learn important sociological aspects of its participants---language, vendor adoption, and so on.

Signals from the crowd: uncovering social relationships through smartphone probes / Marco Valerio, Barbera; Alessandro, Epasto; Mei, Alessandro; Vasile Claudiu, Perta; Stefa, Julinda. - STAMPA. - 2013-:(2013), pp. 265-276. (Intervento presentato al convegno The 2013 ACM Internet measurement conference - IMC '13 tenutosi a Barcellona, Spagna nel Ottobre 2013) [10.1145/2504730.2504742].

Signals from the crowd: uncovering social relationships through smartphone probes

MEI, Alessandro;STEFA, JULINDA
2013

Abstract

The ever increasing ubiquitousness of WiFi access points, coupled with the diffusion of smartphones, suggest that Internet every time and everywhere will soon (if not already has) become a reality. Even in presence of 3G connectivity, our devices are built to switch automatically to WiFi networks so to improve user experience. Most of the times, this is achieved by recurrently broadcasting automatic connectivity requests (known as Probe Requests) to known access points (APs), like, e.g., "Home WiFi", "Campus WiFi", and so on. In a large gathering of people, the number of these probes can be very high. This scenario rises a natural question: "Can significant information on the social structure of a large crowd and on its socioeconomic status be inferred by looking at smartphone probes?". In this work we give a positive answer to this question. We organized a 3-months long campaign, through which we collected around 11M probes sent by more than 160K different devices. During the campaign we targeted national and international events that attracted large crowds as well as other gatherings of people. Then, we present a simple and automatic methodology to build the underlying social graph of the smartphone users, starting from their probes. We do so for each of our target events, and find that they all feature social-network properties. In addition, we show that, by looking at the probes in an event, we can learn important sociological aspects of its participants---language, vendor adoption, and so on.
2013
The 2013 ACM Internet measurement conference - IMC '13
Smartphones, Wi-Fi probe requests, social networks, privacy
04 Pubblicazione in atti di convegno::04b Atto di convegno in volume
Signals from the crowd: uncovering social relationships through smartphone probes / Marco Valerio, Barbera; Alessandro, Epasto; Mei, Alessandro; Vasile Claudiu, Perta; Stefa, Julinda. - STAMPA. - 2013-:(2013), pp. 265-276. (Intervento presentato al convegno The 2013 ACM Internet measurement conference - IMC '13 tenutosi a Barcellona, Spagna nel Ottobre 2013) [10.1145/2504730.2504742].
File allegati a questo prodotto
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11573/530810
 Attenzione

Attenzione! I dati visualizzati non sono stati sottoposti a validazione da parte dell'ateneo

Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 91
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? ND
social impact