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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

This front Page article from today's NYT talks about the lack of privacy and 
possible governmental and corporate abuses, that other articles I've posted 
about have warned. 

 To me, this is a generally good overview, but not with nearly enough warning 
about what is happening 'now' and will be happening very soon, with the 
combination of things like RFID, REAL ID, Licenses Plate monitiring and 
tracking, GPS tracking in almost everything (I saw a "personal tracker GPS, 
'gift, advertised last night , I think for  $49); UAVs,CC and debit card and 
ATM card monitoring, phone call monitoring, and on and on, I casn't remember 
all of the acronyms.

  I realize that most normal people think I am paranoid, but to me, this is a 
very big deal, for which most people pay little attention, and even as these 
very bright students at MIT indicate they don't care, it isn't imporatnt to 
them.  My rant is done for the day on this subject

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

Collective intelligence could create an Orwellian future on a level Big 
Brother could only dream of.

 
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

A smartphone experiment at M.I.T. will build a moving picture of interaction 
in a dorm. The phones generate digital trails to be beamed to a central 
computer. 


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.” 






http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html?8dpc