Recently, Google (News - Alert) granted professors Deborah Estrin and Gaetano Borriello $1.35 million for research on moble sensing.

Areas covered aren’t on machine-to-machine, but on crowd sourcing information from various sources. In other words, they are looking at how you can use your mobile device to gather environmental information. In talking about M2M, I often write about it as a closed system. Enterprises doing transport management are not looking to share their information with anyone else.

The interests of Google are more geared toward the things that people will share. The model is of using your phone for various sensing services and providing that data to a repository for searches.

 

Seems like something Google would be good at.

However, this starts to get interesting when the data collected comes near the same information collected by the enterprise.

Deborah Estrin’s team at the Center for Embedded Network Sensing has a “green” theme on one of its YouTube’s (News - Alert) where they start finding the polluters who are making the air unsafe for a school.

Hard to fight it, but begs the question: What will the impact be?

The mobile industry is constantly being cautioned about data collecting and the need to protect consumer information.

If the Google’s of the world are allowed to provide collected information, will that not be subject to the same standards?

What if the data has anomalies that suggest tampering or require verification that GPS is working properly, that time of day is not altered, and so on?

Won’t the network operator be the logical place to provide a trusted verification?

Video surveillance is becoming common, should we expect other sensors to be included in the time stamp of these devices?

If a company has a confrontational relationship with an organization like GreenPeace, could we end up seeing a sensor war?

I think the opportunities are amazing for sensors and M2M to communication. The ability to gather data and make business decisions based on real time feedback is invaluable. The question is: Will the use of the data by consumers be complimentary to a companies implementation or confrontational?

If its confrontational, the cost starts to included encryption, security and even false sensors providing counter measures. The crowd sourcing equivalent of Stephen Colbert falsifying the polar bear count on Wikipedia.

This gets particularly interesting in the context of the effort to abstract medical health records. Imaging the sensor information being used to correlate hot spots of health issues.

So the grant money is probably not only well spent, but will probably generate alot more as we head toward social sensing.