You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

[Eugen Leitl]

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

November 30, 2008

Youbre Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

By JOHN MARKOFF

Cambridge, Mass.

HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at M.I.T.,
didnbt 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 whobs 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 dormbs social network.

The studentsb 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 Internetbs 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. bThere are
so many uses for this technology b from marketing to war fighting b that I
canbt imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,b 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, bThis is one of the most significant technology
trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious.b

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 personbs profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.

bSome have argued that with new technology there is a diminished expectation
of privacy,b said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. bBut 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.b

Mr. Brown, for one, isnbt 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, bthe way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we all have
e-mail and Web sites and blogs.b

bThis is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy,b 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. Googlebs fabled PageRank algorithm,
which was originally responsible for the quality of Googlebs 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 b like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars b
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 citybs 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 b as determined by ZIP code data b
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.

bThere is a whole new set of metrics that no one has ever measured,b said
Greg Skibiski, chief executive of Sense. bWe were able to look at people
moving around storesb and other locations. Such travel patterns, coupled with
data on incomes, can give retailers early insights into sales levels and who
is shopping at competitorsb 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 labbs technologies to improve
businessesb efficiency. For example, by equipping employees with sensor
badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by the studentsb
smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to-face communication was
far more important to an organizationbs 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
researchersb techniques.

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

Dr. Pentland bis the emperor of networked sensor research,b 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. bThis allows scientists to study those
interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could
do,b 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 bparticipatory sensingb
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.

bOur mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously
unobservable,b 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 researchersb 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.

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

She says that there may still be ways to protect privacy. bI can imagine a
system where the data will disappear,b 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 bPATCH-bayb) 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.

bIf I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped
that morning rather than a couple of weeks later,b he said. bIbm sorry, that
trumps minute concerns about privacy.b

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

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

bFor most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where
everything they did was known by everyone they knew,b Dr. Malone said. bIn
some sense webre becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have
become an anomaly.b