Omniveillance: Smart Phones Tracking Your Location = Tracking Your Existence

April 24th, 2011

So what’s the harm of your cell phone tracking your location? Does it really say anything about who you are, what you believe, and what you want to do? In short, absolutely. The WSJ has a lengthy piece about how scientists can use a person’s movements to determine some quite intimate details about their lives.

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint “influencers,” the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer’s social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.

And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn’t know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.

“Phones can know,” said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, who helped pioneer the research. “People can get this god’s-eye view of human behavior.”

Location is key. I recognized this in Omniveillance, as the places a person chooses to frequent is indicative of who the person is and what he believes in–and that image is often innacurate.

For example, if a wife saw an image of her husband walking out of an adult bookstore, there could be an immediate rush to judgment. Without jumping to any conclusions, the accused husband could have needed to urgently use the bathroom, might have been waiting to pick someone up, or maybe was lost. Nonetheless, once his privacy is violated, most people do not get a second chance to rectify these concerns. When this kind of information is revealed to strangers, prejudice and misjudgments abound.178 . . .

Recording, broadcasting, and archiving a person’s actions may deny him the opportunity to grow and reform.179 Like an elephant, the Internet never forgets.180 Once an image is released, even if it is removed from a web site, it will invariably be stored forever elsewhere.181 For example, if a person is photographed entering a strip club, and he later decides to change his ways, society should at least allow him the opportunity to improve and reform. But once this image is recorded and preserved in perpetuity, the individual may never be able to live down what could have been a single error.182

Additionally, such tracking can chill expressive speech:

The key to understanding privacy is to understand how a person chooses to change his speech and actions in varying contexts.72 Inherent in each human being is a dichotomy between what society sees of a person and what that person knows about himself.73 In fact, the “the first etymological meaning of the word ‘person’ was ‘mask,’ ” as everyone exists behind a façade.74 Generally, when a person is in public, he feels a cloak of anonymity. When no one is paying attention, people tend to act free and uninhibited.75 People may feel comfortable exhibiting certain behavior in front of one audience when anonymity exists, but not in front of another audience when privacy is lacking. A person may comfortably and freely express himself when he has the perception of anonymity, even if it is in front of a close group of friends because of the tight bonds within a social network,76 because there is less fear that what is said or done can be used against him to harm him. Anonymity allows people to act with fewer inhibitions, as they have the ability to control the risk of damage to their reputation.

Indeed, I noted that when Google and others learn more about a person, they would be able to figure out what the person actually wants to do. The only obstacle is the lack of information.

In an interview conducted by the Financial Times, Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted the company’s future goal is to organize people’s daily lives.139 Specifically, Schmidt augured that one day “users [will] . . . be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ” and Google would be able to answer those questions.140 Udi Manber, Google’s Vice President of Engineering in charge of Google Search, reaffirmed this sentiment, and posited that Google has “to understand as much as we can user intent and give [users] the answer they need.”141 Mr. Schmidt acknowledged that the primary obstacle to this goal is not the technology, but the lack of information Google possesses about people.142 Talking to journalists in London, Mr. Schmidt stated, “We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know  enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”143

Mr. Schmidt acknowledged that Google is still in the early stages of gathering the information it has, and that algorithms can only be improved by better personalization.144 What Mr. Schmidt did not mention was how this personalization, that is, the collection of personal information, would take place.

Now, with cell phone tracking, that database of information is available. Omniveillance is not limited to surveillance cameras–smartphones toted around work just as well.

Mirroring my prediction in Omniveillance, the researchers from the WSJ piece commented that such pervasive tracking allows computers to learn much about how humans operate, and even predict where they will go tomorrow–the exact question Schmidt sought to answer.

So far, these studies only scratch the surface of human complexity. Researchers are already exploring ways that the information gleaned from mobile phones can improve public health, urban planning and marketing. At the same time, researchers believe their findings hint at basic rules of human interaction, and that poses new challenges to notions of privacy.

“We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable,” said Johan Bollen, an expert in complex networks at Indiana University. “These regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for.”

Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means. At Northeastern University in Boston, network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users.

After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the researchers determined that, taken together, people’s movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern. The scientists said that, with enough information about past movements, they could forecast someone’s future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy.

Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means. At Northeastern University in Boston, network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users.

After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the researchers determined that, taken together, people’s movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern. The scientists said that, with enough information about past movements, they could forecast someone’s future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy.

Yes, with enough information, like Schmidt said, scientists can tell you what you should do tomorrow. Omniveillance is nigh.

A few more interesting bits from the article. One study looked at the wisdom of the crowds via Twitter messages to predict swings in the Dow Jones:

Dr. Bollen and his colleagues, for example, found that the millions of Twitter messages sent via mobile phones and computers every day captured swings in national mood that presaged changes in the Dow Jones index up to six days in advance with 87.6% accuracy.

The researchers analyzed the emotional content of words used in 9.7 million of the terse 140-character text messages posted by 2.7 million tweeters between March and December 2008. As Twitter goes, so goes the stock market, the scientists found.