You're heading for your favourite café when your phone buzzes. Try the one round the corner, it suggests: you might run into a regular who shares your passion for collecting stamps.Implausible? Perhaps not. The foundations of such a network are already here, in the form of a system that can predict where you'll go, and who you'll meet there (see page 22). But the questions it raises are more social than technical. To help people with their social lives, the system would have to track them, not just their phones, match their identities to their social profiles and spot situations where their path might cross that of an interesting stranger.
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