Reality Mining with Mobile PhonesMIT’s Technology Review reports on “reality mining” — mining your everyday social interactions — with mobile phone sensors to build an inferential portrait of who you interact with, what you do, and where you go. As Professor Sandy Pentland describes: Today’s cell phones are on us all the time, and they come with hardware that can act as sensors for your environment. For instance, if Bluetooth is turned on, then the phone can see and be seen by other Bluetooth devices. You can start to make a record of the Bluetooth-enabled devices you encounter throughout the day. Then you can figure out, based on the frequency [with which] you encounter other people’s Bluetooth phones, what sort of relationship you have with them.
The iPhone also has an accelerometer that could tell if you are sitting and walking. You don’t have to explicitly type stuff in; it’s just measured. And all phones have built-in microphones that can be used to analyze your tone of voice, how long you talk, how often you interrupt people. These patterns can tell you what roles people play in groups: you can figure out who the leader is and who the followers are. It’s folk psychology, and some of the stuff people may already know, but we haven’t been able to measure it, at such a large scale, before these phones. Cool stuff — the kind of data gathering that makes social scientists very excited. But as the Technology Review reporter is apt enough to point out, “this all gets very creepy very fast,” and Pentland wisely points out the need for privacy in this type of data gathering, even recommending that they should be opt-in, or that personal data is stripped out. Admittedly, it feels like progress to see privacy issues mentioned front and center in a story like this. With any luck, that spirit won’t get lost when projects such as these make it into the design phase. |
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