Be Counted! Return Your Census!

Path Intelligence presentation at the latest Where 2.0 conference drew some attention from the media (e.g. Shops track customers via mobile phone) and legitimate concerns on the derive of reality mining, behavioral tracking, and the type of research on geographically-anchored digital footprints I am involved in. The debate crystalizes around the issues of gathering data from people without their knowledge and the risk to reveal individuals from anonymized and aggregated sensor data. Similar concerns also raised lately from Google Street View vehicles capturing the streets of Rome (and their face-blurring workaround) or the use of Bluetooth scanning to reveal mobility traces. They also apply to my analysis of georeferenced photos and other digital footprints. I make sure to cover the privacy and ethical issues in my publications (confronting this work to my peers’ ethic).

However I try to slightly differentiate myself from these approaches that rely on the deployment of ad-hoc sensor infrastructures. First, my approach innovates in exploiting anonymized, aggregated, publicly available data. Second, I apply the results to the context of cities services (e.g. tourism) and develop tools and techniques for the interests of citizens and visitors. Of course it implies revealing information that are not of primary benefits of each individual who contributes to a census. They can challenge political decisions that were previously taken based on assumptions or limited survey data. For instance it might lead to a decrease in the offering of public transports in a unjustifiably well-connected neighborhood. They can create a new private service such as Google My Location which relies on millions of its Mobile Maps users who happen to have phones with built-in GPS devices to improve the quality of their positioning system.

Traditional contemporary census campaing in Cambridge, MA

That being said, the discussion on linking the behavioral data back to the individual reminds me of the Web 1.0b and the debates around the use of cookies to keep track of browsing behaviors. Back in that days, some arguments were based on legitimate concerns but also on misconceptions of the purpose of cookies. Now in the ubicomp days, I also see my scientific contribution in providing an understanding of the potentials of digital footprints analysis (similarly as the You are Here project) for good or for worse. It comes down to needing to have open discussions about the implications of these things (see Data sharing threatens privacy). The people making policies don’t know what is possible, and they don’t necessarily make policies that are in our best interest. For some reason, I prefer myself or Sandy Pentland (see What Your Phone Knows About You) in raising the awareness on the opportunities and issues than somebody with potential lower ethical standards.

Update: In Privacy concerns about the capture of electronic traces in urban viz projects, Nicolas discusses a fresh article in The Guardian “Bluetooth is watching: secret study gives Bath a flavour of Big Brother” giving some heat to the Cityware Project on privacy concerns over bluetooth tracking solutions.

Finally, the discussion and my work exemplify the shift from large-scale top-down big brother to more local bottom-up little sister types of people monitoring as coined by Jan Chipchase in Big Brother / Little Sister:

“When it comes to surveillance most people think of big brother, but increasingly its your (early adopting, tech savvy, sensor loaded) little sister. Which makes the whole notion of opting out of technology adoption one of whether to opt out of society”

The Economist also has a piece on with in its article on A world of witnesses and the concept of “sousveillance”:

Does this trend give any cause for concern? To some people it suggests a coming surveillance state, as all sorts of titbits about people’s personal lives that used to be private become input for new services such as traffic maps, health warnings or security alerts. Those worries, evoking an earlier era of top-down control by a Big Brother, are mostly misplaced, claims Mr Verclas. A neighbourhood-watch community with global reach is a better metaphor. Instead of surveillance, watching from above, society will rely on a new and opposite concept, sousveillance, watching from below. Such arguments may make more sense in California than in China.

Relation to my thesis: My thesis will certainly include a thorough ethic and privacy issues section. Looking for an angle from the current discussions on the topic. Part of my contribution will be to discuss the implications of sousveillance raised by the analysis of digital footprints.