AppId is over the quota
By Ashlee Vance
Illustrations by Andy Rementer
The technicians at SecureAlert’s monitoring center in Salt Lake City sit in front of computer screens filled with multicolored dots. Each dot represents someone on parole or probation wearing one of the company’s location-reporting ankle cuffs. As the people move around a city, their dots move around the map. “It looks a bit like an animated gumball machine,” says Steven Florek, SecureAlert’s vice-president of offender insights and knowledge management. As long as the gumballs don’t go where they’re not supposed to, all is well.
The company works with law enforcement agencies around the U.S. to keep track of about 15,000 ex-cons, meaning it must collect and analyze billions of GPS signals transmitted by the cuffs each day. The more traditional part of the work consists of making sure that people under house arrest stay in their houses. But advances in the way information is collected and sorted mean SecureAlert isn’t just watching; the company says it can actually predict when a crime is about to go down. If that sounds like the “pre-cogs”—crime prognosticators—in the movie Minority Report, Florek thinks so, too. He calls SecureAlert’s newest capability “pre-crime” detection.
Using data from the ankle cuffs and other sources, SecureAlert identifies patterns of suspicious behavior. A person convicted of domestic violence, for example, might get out of jail and set up a law-abiding routine. Quite often, though, SecureAlert’s technology sees such people backslide and start visiting the restaurants or schools or other places their victims frequent. “We know they’re looking to force an encounter,” Florek says. If the person gets too close for comfort, he says, “an alarm goes off and a flashing siren appears on the screen.” The system doesn’t go quite as far as Minority Report, where the cops break down doors and blow away the perpetrators before they perpetrate. Rather, the system can call an offender through a two-way cellphone attached to the ankle cuff to ask what the person is doing, or set off a 95-decibel shriek as a warning to others. More typically, the company will notify probation officers or police about the suspicious activity and have them investigate. Presumably with weapons holstered. “It’s like a strategy game,” Florek says. (Before Bloomberg Businessweek went to press, Florek left the company for undisclosed reasons.)
It didn’t used to be that a company the size of SecureAlert, with about $16?million in annual revenue, could engage in such a real-world chess match. For decades, only Fortune 500-scale corporations and three-letter government agencies had the money and resources to pull off this kind of data crunching. Wal-Mart Stores is famous for using data analysis to adjust its inventory levels and prices. FedEx earned similar respect for tweaking its delivery routes, while airlines and telecommunications companies used this technology to pinpoint and take care of their best customers. But even at the most sophisticated corporations, data analytics was often a cumbersome, ad hoc affair. Companies would pile information in “data warehouses,” and if executives had a question about some demographic trend, they had to supplicate “data priests” to tease the answers out of their costly, fragile systems. “This resulted in a situation where the analytics were always done looking in the rearview mirror,” says Paul Maritz, chief executive officer of VMware. “You were reasoning over things to find out what happened six months ago.”
In the early 2000s a wave of startups made it possible to gather huge volumes of data and analyze it in record speed—à la SecureAlert. A retailer such as Macy’s that once pored over last season’s sales information could shift to looking instantly at how an e-mail coupon for women’s shoes played out in different regions. “We have a banking client that used to need four days to make a decision on whether or not to trade a mortgage-backed security,” says Charles W. Berger, CEO of ParAccel, a data analytics startup founded in 2005 that powers SecureAlert’s pre-crime operation. “They do that in seven minutes now.”
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