privacy

Personal Analytics: The Hyper Examined Life

Jerry Sheehan — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:06:57 -0800

Description

The unexamined life is not worth living
-Socrates, The Apology (38a)[1]

Humans are a social species with a deep need to share experiences. From Neanderthal cave drawings to modern Web page, we have always exploited readily available technologies to share data. Today we see increasing changes in societal behavior regarding information sharing as social networking technologies are leading to the proliferation of deeply personal information being shared in on-line public environments. This trend is important to track because it opens opportunities for a more data driven view of our lives but at the same time may be redefining the modern conception of privacy.

One of the “killer applications” of Web 2.0 is Twitter (http://www.twitter.com). Twitter allows users to post answers to the question “What are you doing?” via the Web or a phone that is then shared with followers (users subscribed to you). Tweets (Twitter updates) are brief (limited to 140 characters) but million of users update multiple times daily. No topic is off limit with many sharing their daily moods, love life, work experiences, etc. Users will frequently comment on one another’s experience, and it is this social aspect that has led to the viral spread of the Web site. Perhaps the best analogy for the experience is to that of a global public water cooler.

As sensors and wireless technologies have become more ubiquitous consumer devices have proliferated allowing us to record and share everything from our athletic performance to vital signs. One of the hottest consumer electronic devices in the last two years has been the Nike + System for runners. This system allows a cheap sensor to be placed on a running shoe that records data on both time and distance to an iPod. This data is then upload and visualized to a community site (Nike + http://nikeplus.nike.com) that allows runners to track not only their personal best time but to engage in community challenges.

Medical information is also undergoing a transformation and becoming a social commodity. Patients Like Me (http://www.patientslikeme.com/) is a social networking web site developed by three engineers from MIT who watched a friend with Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) struggle to identify treatments that would help him manage his disease. The site allows users suffering from a number of diseases to log-on to a social network where they share exceptionally personal health care information with others suffering from their disease. The degree of data publicly viewable on this site is incredible. HIV patients share their white blood cell counts and correlate that with how they are feeling, individuals suffering from depression elaborate on their daily doses of mood altering drugs and their impact, etc. Help groups are nothing new in medicine, but increasingly they are moving on-line and becoming more data driven then before. Apart from the direct benefits to users of having access to distributed safety nets of individuals sharing in their particular ailment there are also important questions about if increased sharing of disease data will lead to better treatment. [2]

A review of the social networking ecosystem shows an incredible breadth in the type of information that people are willing to share on-line without the slightest hesitation. Perhaps the most shocking, is the new site BedPost (http://www.bedposted.com/). While the site is “private” it was created to map users’ sex lives and allows users to input data on everything from duration of the encounter to descriptive phrases that can be aggregated over time in the form of a wag cloud. [3]

Implications of all this trend of the posting of personal information on-line in social networks could have profound implications for privacy. As Christopher Soghoian, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society remarks, “for most users, the cost outweigh the benefit.” Specifically, he points to the legal concept called the “third party” doctrine that eliminates a right to privacy for users who place their information voluntarily on-line. In addition, private investigators and the federal government could freely review this information. Currently, President Elect Obama’s nominees have been asked to disclose what social networks they participate in and even share blog posts they think might be problematic.[4]

Science in the United States

Source

[1]”Socrates: Philosophical Life”, http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2d.htm
[2] “About”, PatientsLikeMe Web Site, http://www.patientslikeme.com/about
[3] “Bytes of Life”, Monica Hesse, Washington Post, September 9, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/08/AR2008090802681.html

[4]”The New Examined Life”, Jamin-Brophy Warrin, Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122852285532784401.html

Living A Bit: Recording Our Own Digimentory

Jerry Sheehan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:36:17 -0700

Description

The Internet is quickly morphing into becoming the "tool of all tools" replacing the dial tone of yesterday's phone, information sources like the public library, and the the social gossip of the water cooler. This centralized technological infrastructure coupled with decentralized content authorship (text, audio, video) leads to a documentation and sharing of our lives in ways previously inconceivable.

Remember yesterday when photos of our childhood were preciously stored in albums and just shared with family? Today Flickr (an on-line photo storage service) hosts over 2.4 billion photos with an average of 4,596 new images being uploaded ever minute![1]

Video is no different. Gone are the days of grainy amateur video that required a specialized projector to bore relatives, replaced with high definition content uploaded on YouTube for the public to view. To put the video numbers in perspective, the number of unique individuals using YouTube in March 2008 was 20 million. This monthly "citizenship" makes YouTube 20 million stronger then France.[2]

We are not just recording the memorable moments of our lives and digitally storing them, but rather we are increasingly recording everything we do. A relatively new disruptive technology called Twitter asks users to answer via a web site in >140 characters the question, "What Are You Doing"? In March 2008, a million users told their "followers" about three times a day what they were doing.[3]

Are their limits to what type of information individuals want to share? One of the more interesting trends to watch is the growth or demise of the personal health record systems developed by Google and Microsoft. These two competing systems allow users to store, edit, and share their personal health information on-line. Google's initial pilot has about 10,000 users, while Micrsoft's may have over 100,000 .[4][5]

Living and documenting our personal and professional world "online" will have profound impacts on our definition of privacy, transparency, and identity.

Computer & Information Science

Source

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/rexguo/2467112209/sizes/
[2] http://www.onlinevideowatch.com/
[3]
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/29/end-of-speculation-the-real-twitter-usa
ge-numbers/
[4]
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080221-concerns-loom-as-google-begins
-testing-health-records-system.html
[5] http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_9506425?nclick_check=1

Software-sorted geographies

Jess Hemerly — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:12:05 -0800

Description

Abstract:

This paper explores the central role of computerised code in shaping the social and geographical politics of inequality in advanced societies. Arguing that ‘software-sorting’ techniques are now being widely applied in efforts to try and separate privileged and marginalised groups and places across a wide range of sectors and domains, the paper analyses recent research addressing three examples of software-sorting in practice. These address physical and electronic mobility systems, online Geographical Information Systems (GISs), and face-recognition Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems covering city streets. The paper finishes by identifying research and policy implications of the diffusion of software-sorted geographies within which computerised code continually orchestrates inequality through technological systems embedded within urban environments.

Source

Graham, S. (2005). "Software-sorted geographies." Progress in Human Geography 29 (5):562-580.

Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech "When Blobjects Rule the Earth"

Jess Hemerly — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:58:32 -0800

Description

From the spech:

So what's a Blobject? And why might they rule the Earth?

Since I write about design quite a lot, sometimes people think I made up that word, "blobject". If you Google it, my name pops right up, but I didn't coin the term. A famous industrial designer named Karim Rashid made it up, and he wrote about it in a book aptly called "I Want to Change the World." A good book, very educational, you should buy it and read it. I did. Karim's not kidding.

A Blobject is commonly defined as "an object with a curvilinear, flowing design, such as the Apple iMac computer and the Volkswagen Beetle." But computers and cars are just end products, they're not the process. The truth about a blobject is that is a physical object that has suffered a remake through computer graphics. It was designed on a screen with a graphics program. A blobject is what a standard 20th century industrial product, a consumer item, looks like after your crowd has beaten it into shape with a mouse.

Source

Sterling, Bruce (2004). “When Blobjects Rule the Earth”, SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August, 2004