There is an interesting article from
Sandy Pentland of MIT (pointer via
Nick Carr).
The subject is Reality Mining:
Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling....
...Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations.
So far so good...in fact Telcos have been doing this for decades (remember Friends and Family), and the Mobile aspect has been around awhile so no surprises there. However, predicting what an
individual will do next is emergent - the sheer processing power and data required has made this impractical in the past. But here's where it gets even more interesting...
Just look at a cell phone. It knows where you are, and this is obviously sort of useful. But the generalization is that maybe it can know lots of things about you. Take your Facebook friends as an example. The phone could know which ones you socialize with in person, which ones are your work friends, and which friends you've never seen in your life. That's an interesting distinction, and reality mining can make it automatic. It's about making the "dumb" information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in ...
This reminds me of the thoughts I had when I was listening to Leisa Reichelt talk about
Ambient Intimacy at FOWA, ie the "intimacy filters" are just too coarse today. We had earlier done a piece of work on what we called a "Multimedia Directory", ie something that links all the directories you have into one system. I was well aware of the level of analysis a network operator can apply to a social net then, so at the time
I wrote:
....If presence data is persistently out there, it means others can potentially see every 'phatic transaction you ever made, a thing which we humans have devised a huge number of routines around keeping fairly private in real life - or at least we have always worked in social nets where it is non persistent so memory fades (so I can't count the number of times Leisa poked Jyri rather than me in the last 10 years, for example) - so making it extremely clear where we stand with each other in relation to others is potentially quite explosive.
In a way Twitter measuring all the @xxxx links is an early day implementation of these concepts
However, reading this article tonight has pushed my thinking further. If you take the transactions going on by definition in any ambient intimacy world, deep monitor the way you attend to the stimuli, and hit the events with reality mining, you get a system which is Beacon on steroids (Beacon does not yet see your ambient comms across all media). And as Pentland notes:
"The people making policies don't know what is [technologically] possible, and they don't necessarily make policies that are in our best interest ... These capabilities are coming, but we have to come to a new deal. It doesn't do any good to stick your head in the sand about it."
And as we have learned with Facebook Beacon, there are people who are fully aware of what these systems can do, and are desperate to do it despite "smart user" concerns as it is clear the rank and file don't know / don't care.
Thus I think we need to start to think very clearly of how to obfuscate our ambient intimacy tracks, because UM / SocNet systems like Twitter and Jaiku are the start of these sorts of systems, and if Facebook, Google, or even
Yahoo can get their hands on your composite online and telephone activity together, then, as Nick notes:
The commercial value of reality mining is far too great to restrict the technique to the ivory tower. The resulting intrusions into personal privacy could well be dramatic
