Mapping Urban Flux

In the book of the New York Talk Exchange project, William Mitchell addresses in “Mapping Urban Flux” the ethical issue of analyzing digital traces to reveal the urban dynamics:

There is little doubt that the capacity to track, analyze, and map urban activity in fine-grained, real time detail will open up powerful new ways of providing services to urban inhabitants, of managing urban systems efficiently, of enhancing safety and security, and of making well-informed planning decisions.
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But the crucial questions that loom here are not ones of technological feasibility. They are questions of how we will want to make some difficult social tradeoffs, how we will debate these tradeoffs, and how much power we still may have to affect them anyway.
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But if this explanation does not take place within a framework of vigilant, carefully debated, vigorously formulated and executed public policy – with careful attention to issues of data aggregation and individual privacy – we will soon find that have unwittingly allowed the stealthy, piecemeal emergence of an irreversible condition of electronic hyper-visiblity.

Relation to my thesis: In my thesis I will need to discuss the ethical issues and social tradeoffs in analyzing individual and aggregated digital traces.