DreamLab

I recently found an application called DreamLab which was being promoted by the company Vodafone. With your permission, the app would use your mobile phone's processing power while you sleep. This processing power is used to crack different Cancer related calculations. Together, those who download this application can play a part in potentially solving these problems that could eventually lead to a breakthrough in Cancer research.

What if our phone's processing power is used in such a way in the future? How could government use this sort of system?

In an article on the DreamLab by Emily Reynolds for Wired, she stated that

"The potential power generated by the app is considerable -- researchers compared it to a "supercomputer". With 100,000 app installs, researchers would be able to process data 3,000 times faster than at present. With 5 million users, that would increase to 150,000 times".