the reality miners

Much in the news these days about using sensors in various ways to track and connect people.

Northeastern did a study on the movements of cellphone users.

So Barabási and his colleagues teamed up with a mobile-phone company (unidentified to protect customers' privacy), who provided them with anonymized data on which transmitter towers had handled the calls and texts for 100,000 individuals over the course of 6 months.

Mobile phones demystify commuter rat race - Nature News - 4 June 2008 | doi:10.1038/news.2008.874

The accompanying Nature editorial lauds the possibility for better data for social scientists

The mobile-phone technique is simply the latest example of how modern information technologies are giving social scientists the power to make measurements that are often as precise as those in the 'hard' sciences. By analysing e-mail transmissions, for example, or doing automated searches of publication databases, social scientists can collect detailed information on the network structure of scientific collaborations and other social interactions.

A flood of hard data - Nature 453, 698 (5 June 2008) | doi:10.1038/453698a; Published online 4 June 2008

Wired reports on tracking the interactions of students.

If you have enough data about commonplace conversations, you can even predict when those conversations are going to take place. Working with Pentland, Nathan Eagle tracked the physical interactions of 100 MIT students over an academic year, using their cell phones. After a few months, Eagle could deduce likely future meetings with impressive accuracy. "So if we know that," he says, "why not design our calendars to sync up?"

Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends' - Wired Magazine 16.08 (August 2008)

Thompson's article ends on a prescient note:

The scary part of reality mining, as everyone involved readily admits, is that it's a potential privacy nightmare. ...

Eagle is currently analyzing 12 billion anonymized calls placed during one month in the UK.

Prescient because a story popped up in the news in which people were very unhappy to find that, in a different study, movements were being tracked based on Bluetooth signals.

Bluetooth mobile phone technology is being used to monitor the movement of tens of thousands of people, without their consent.

A research project has installed Bluetooth scanners in offices, cafes, shops, and pubs to monitor how people move around cities. But the residents of Bath, who are at the centre of this research, are unaware that their mobile phones and laptops are communicating with the scanners.

The team behind the project, Cityware, stresses that the scanners are not able to personally identify individuals, but privacy groups have expressed concerns about the scheme. The Information Commissioners' Office, which deals with data protection and privacy legislation, said it was "monitoring" the experiment.    

Bluetooth used to track people's movements - Telegraph.co.uk - Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/07/2008

Meanwhile, Boing Boing reports on hackers (of all people) having the opportunity to wear RFID tags to map and discover each other.

This weekend, the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project at the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in NYC will introduce a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests. Conference goers will be given unprecedented ability to connect with new people, find the talks they're most interested in attending, see what's happening and where in real time, and experience and talk about the way RFID technology is changing the world.

RFID badges at HOPE hackercon form automatic social nets and irony - Boing Boing - July 16, 2008

Our ability to gather data on every aspect of everyone's daily life is becoming incredibly powerful.  Powerful technologies require great wisdom to wield for good and not ill.  I am concerned we (and in particular the leadership we chose) lack that wisdom.

David Brin has explored these topics at length.  They are an aspect of his book Earth (1990), and he expanded greatly upon those ideas in The Transparent Society (1998). 

You can read a Discover interview with Brin from last year.

There are many different aspects to this, from illegal monitoring of people's activities in cyberspace, to quasi-legal tracking online, to people simply giving their information up on various social networks.  But the above items are more about reality mining, which is the new ability to track individual movements in great detail in the physical world.  Cellphones are an obvious technology platform for this, as are standalone GPS loggers and RFID.  Individuals now have the capacity to conduct surveillance, sometimes called in this case sousveillance.  Beyond that surveillance possibilities include CCTV cameras, large surveillance drones at various altitudes, and even tiny mobile or flying cameras, reminiscent of the bug in Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy (1974).

One of the unfortunate things about science fiction is that while it raises issues decades in advance of them becoming technologically feasible, it is often little heeded, and when the foreseen changes actually do come, people either don't pay attention to them, or make remarkably bad decisions about how to use and control their new abilities.