[Infowarrior] - You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

[Richard Forno]

November 30, 2008
You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
By JOHN MARKOFF

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html?pagewanted=print

HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at  
M.I.T., didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked  
this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move,  
he receives a free smartphone.

Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an  
e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they  
know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with  
him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.

Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T.  
have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate  
digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual  
actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social  
network.

The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital  
information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from  
phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our  
movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered  
from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis  
for an emerging field called collective intelligence.

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into  
every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful  
capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving  
community groups new ways to organize.

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective  
intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big  
Brother could only dream of.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance  
companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify  
people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance  
coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could  
identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks  
revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this  
technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it  
not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve  
Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in  
New York.

In a widely read Web posting, he argued that there were significant  
chances that it would be misused, “This is one of the most significant  
technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most  
pernicious.”

For the last 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of the  
individual in the computer age. But new technologies have become so  
powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only  
issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to  
analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without  
monitoring him or her directly.

“Some have argued that with new technology there is a diminished  
expectation of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of  
the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in  
Washington. “But the opposite may also be true. New techniques may  
require us to expand our understanding of privacy and to address the  
impact that data collection has on groups of individuals and not  
simply a single person.”

Mr. Brown, for one, isn’t concerned about losing his privacy. The  
M.I.T researchers have convinced him that they have gone to great  
lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that  
would reveal his identity.

Besides, he says, “the way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we  
all have e-mail and Web sites and blogs.”

“This is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy,” he adds.

GOOGLE and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers  
spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and  
wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled  
PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality  
of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent  
wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.

The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November,  
initially for the Apple iPhone, that gains its accuracy in large part  
from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that  
its users have entered in the last decade. In the future, Google will  
take advantage of spoken queries to predict even more accurately the  
questions its users will ask.

And, a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for  
spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.

The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless  
Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS  
units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective  
intelligence technologies.

In 2006, Sense Networks, based in New York, proved that there was a  
wealth of useful information hidden in a digital archive of GPS data  
generated by tens of thousands of taxi rides in San Francisco. It  
could see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial  
district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming,  
but later when it was down.

It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code  
data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.

Sense has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on  
smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone, and the other for  
companies interested in forecasting social trends and financial  
behavior. The consumer application, Citysense, identifies  
entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp  
and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by  
tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.

The second application, Macrosense, is intended to give businesses  
insight into human activities. It uses a vast database that merges  
GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency  
identification chips and other sensors.

“There is a whole new set of metrics that no one has ever measured,”  
said Greg Skibiski, chief executive of Sense. “We were able to look at  
people moving around stores” and other locations. Such travel  
patterns, coupled with data on incomes, can give retailers early  
insights into sales levels and who is shopping at competitors’ stores.

Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts  
Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project,  
was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of  
researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the  
past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from  
questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty  
of the subjects.

The Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the  
Japanese technology company, to use some of the lab’s technologies to  
improve businesses’ efficiency. For example, by equipping employees  
with sensor badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by  
the students’ smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to- 
face communication was far more important to an organization’s work  
than was generally believed.

Productivity improved 30 percent with an incremental increase in face- 
to-face communication, Dr. Pentland said. The results were so  
promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business that  
overhauls organizations via the researchers’ techniques.

Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it  
from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more  
traditional methods.

Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said  
Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications  
networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations,  
he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another  
through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This  
allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years  
ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.

ONCE based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence  
systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks  
of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of  
scientists and political and environmental activists are developing  
“participatory sensing” networks.

At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of  
California, Los Angeles, for example, researchers are developing a Web  
service they call a Personal Environmental Impact Report to build a  
community map of air quality in Los Angeles. It is intended to let  
people assess how their activities affect the environment and to make  
decisions about their health. Users may decide to change their jogging  
route, or run at a different time of day, depending on air quality at  
the time.

“Our mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously  
unobservable,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the center and a  
computer scientist at U.C.L.A.

But Dr. Estrin said the project still faced a host of challenges, both  
with the accuracy of tiny sensors and with the researchers’ ability to  
be certain that personal information remains private. She is skeptical  
about technical efforts to obscure the identity of individual  
contributors to databases of information collected by network sensors.

Attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited  
capability, she said. The researchers encrypt the data to protect  
against identifying particular people, but that has limits.

“Even though we are protecting the information, it is still subject to  
subpoena and subject to bullying bosses or spouses,” she said.

She says that there may still be ways to protect privacy. “I can  
imagine a system where the data will disappear,” she said.

Already, activist groups have seized on the technology to improve the  
effectiveness of their organizing. A service called MobileActive helps  
nonprofit organizations around the world use mobile phones to harness  
the expertise and the energy of their participants, by sending out  
action alerts, for instance.

Pachube (pronounced “PATCH-bay”) is a Web service that lets people  
share real-time sensor data from anywhere in the world. With Pachube,  
one can combine and display sensor data, from the cost of energy in  
one location, to temperature and pollution monitoring, to data flowing  
from a buoy off the coast of Charleston, S.C., all creating an  
information-laden snapshot of the world.

Such a complete and constantly updated picture will undoubtedly  
redefine traditional notions of privacy.

DR. PENTLAND says there are ways to avoid surveillance-society  
pitfalls that lurk in the technology. For the commercial use of such  
information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English  
common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data  
about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that  
you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data  
that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or  
redeploy your data as you wish.

At the same time, he argued that individual privacy rights must also  
be weighed against the public good.

Citing the epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or  
SARS, in recent years, he said technology would have helped health  
officials watch the movement of infected people as it happened,  
providing an opportunity to limit the spread of the disease.

“If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been  
stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later,” he said.  
“I’m sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy.”

Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong  
concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in  
human history.

“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically  
changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human  
efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for  
Collective Intelligence.

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where  
everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said.  
“In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out  
to have become an anomaly.”