The Future Place Blog

Will the EU kill data portability?

TechCrunch has an interesting post about how the EU's data protection legislation might prevent the current trend towards data portability. The trend has been to enable users to take their 'social graphs' with them from one system to another. In this context the social graph is more than just the email addresses, it is all those pieces of information.

For example, if you have a list of email addresses in your email system on your laptop in say Germany and you sign up to Twitter or FaceBook and upload your contacts in order to find friends you are probably breaking Article 8

• 8. Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area, unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection of the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

Users of systems such as social networks currently appear to have conflicting aspirations. They want to avoid spam, marketing, and abuse, but they also want to aggregate all their information so that they can contact all their contacts in a seamless way.

If the EU remains set on its current course (and that seems very likely) and if social networks become of increasing importance (and to me that too seems likely) we may see a significant business advantage being handed to non-EU countries, particularly Asia and USA.

Surveillance grows worldwide

The BBC have a report about the decline in personal privacy and the growth in surveillance. The article is based on a report by Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The report shows that more nations than ever were rated as places where surveillance is endemic. The eleven countries who were at the bottom of the pile (i.e. the worst) were (in alphabetical order):

• England
• Wales
• Malaysia
• China
• Russia
• Singapore
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• US

The electronic wake and you

The BBC have a detailed article about the sort of data that is being held on ordinary citizens. Researcher Niamh Gallagher estimates that the average economically active person is on 700 databases. A 2006/7 report from the UK's Information Commissioner estimated that there were almost 300,000 data controllers in the UK.

At present there seems to be two trends. The first is a growing sense of concern about Governments, police forces, and double glazing salesmen misusing data, along with the risk of identify ford. The second strand is that people are handing over every larger amounts of personal information in oder to receive more tailored and personalised services.

Nightclub members pay with embedded RFID

Patrons of the Baja Club in Barcelona have the choice of easy entry and of paying by having an RFID chip embedded in their arm. This is an old story, but I have only just heard about it. Another example of the Electronic Wake.

For more information check out this 2004 article by the BBC.

Is Google the biggest threat to privacy?

Several sites are reporting that Google has ranked bottom in a survey about privacy related issues, for example Slashdot. The London based Privacy International organisation looked at 22 leading companies, such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL. The study ranked the companies and Google was the only company to fall in the bottom category, one that Privacy International described as “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”.

The key issue with Google is not that it does not protect information, it appears to be quite good at not giving it to third parties, but rather about the information it gathers and stores about users.

Although no company was able to reach Privacy Internationals top category, five were rated as “generally privacy aware”, these were BBC, eBay, Last.fm, LiveJournal.com, and Wikipedia.

Perhaps the big question is “Does it matter?”. I think the answer to that question depends on whether Google is seen to be hypocritical. If Google collects user information and uses it to provide a better service, then most users (but not me) will tend to see that as OK. Because it seems that most citizens do not value their privacy. If asked a question about privacy in isolation they say they want it protecting, but when offered a small incentive, such as a service improvement, most people in most markets hand over large amounts of personal information very readily – hence the comment that they don’t ‘value’ privacy.

However, if Google are caught collecting more information than people think AND they start using it in ways that people did not expect, then they could be in trouble. Another threat to Google is if legislators start to get involved, as the European Parliament are already threatening to do, and if the regulators looking into Google’s purchase of DoubleClick start taking privacy concerns into account.

RFIDs could be used to track students

The BBC has reported that two companies (Motorola and Siemens) have been talking about how RFIDs and Wi-Fi could be used to track people and assets, at the The Wireless Event in London. Hitherto, the fear of tracking using RFIDs has been a little abated by their lack of range. However, the combination of Wi-Fi and RFIDs raises the technical possibility of tracking people and things.

The companies’ spokespeople make a relatively convincing case for putting chips in say expensive hospital equipment, so they can be tracked around, say, a hospital (although perhaps people could simply return mega expensive equipment when they use it). But when asked about why they considered tracking students, they said in cases of emergency such as fires, allowing the authorities to know where people were.

Not only is the idea worrying in terms of big brother and the electronic wake, it shows charming naivety to imagine that students will remember to wear their tags, and that they will wear only their own tags!

Google want to use the electronic wake to control your life

In five years Google would like to have collected enough information about you to be able to answer such questions as “What shall I do tomorrow?” and “What job shall I take?”. At least that is the view of Eric Schmidt, the Chief Executive of Google when asked how Google might look in five years, according to FT.com, via lifehacker.

Google are in a race to collect the most comprehensive database of individual information. As well as storing your searches and general Google usage there are parts of the Google service which are particularly fruitful in terms of generating usable electronic wake. iGoogle allows users to personalise their own Google search, and will generate more information for Google, as will Google's personalised search which was launched two years ago.

A new Google service under development is Google Recommendations, where the search suggests products and services the user may like, based on their existing electronic wake, this too will build up usable, proprietary, electronic wake.

My instinctive response to this sort of news is to shrink back into my 60s hippy, liberal rejection of “The Man”. However, that response could simply show how out of touch I am. If we look at the way people share their information via Social Networks, it may be that the majority will be happy to surrender all this information, if it provides a better level of service.

I am also reminded of the film Minority Report where the system was able to predict crime, and people were arrested for Future Crime. I worry that this sort of electronic wake will be used to arrest people who have never broken the law, but who are considered likely to – and again, the majority may say “so what, sounds good to me”, unless it is them who is wrongfully arrested.

Using Mobile Phones to Track People Flows

The Economist’s Technology Quarterly Report has an article, unfortunately in the pay section if you are not a subscriber, about another development in the way that the electronic wake is being mined. Researchers at MIT have latched onto the fact that most people in developed economies carry a mobile phone, so they can use the movement of these phones to measure and map how many people are travelling at any given time.

As pilot projects MIT have worked with two mobile phone operators, Telecom Italia and Mobilkom Austria. The data given to MIT is evidently anonymous, at present, and is has been used to map the number of people travelling. One potential customer is Italian information company SEAT. SEAT provides real-time traffic maps to help people avoid traffic congestion. At present SEAT use roadside cameras, toll-road data, information from the police, and data from 220,000 cars fitted with satellite tracking devices. But SEAT’s current operation is very expensive and only gives some of the information they want. SEAT estimate that within two years they will be able to use data from mobile phone companies to map roads congestion. SEAT expect to pay about €30 million a year for this data.

One of the first projects that is likely to happen will have a direct impact on market research. Rome’s Mayor is set to use the system to improve planning and scheduling for the city’s transport system, ATAC. At present ATAC use an annual survey of 2000 people at a cost of just over €60 per person to create an imperfect picture of who goes where. The Mayor of Rome expects to be able to use the mobile phone data to improve the scheduling and planning for the City’s 2,100 buses, plus making improvements to the siting and phasing of traffic lights. Samarcanda, a Rome taxi company, is providing free consultancy to the project in return for access to the data, because they believe it will allow them to run their business better.

Despite being a threat to some market research niches this sort of people mapping has the potential improve transport and city planning in every part of the world where most people have a mobile phone. However, it does represent another turning of ratchet with respect to the extent to which we are all being watched, all the time.

People do not ‘Value’ their Privacy and Security

A report from ChoiceStream discussed on Clickz underlines the point I have made before about many (perhaps most) people’s attitude to handing over their details.

Ask a question to citizens about whether they value their privacy and security and they will say yes, and often lobby legislators. But, when citizens are offered some small service they appear all to ready to exchange valuable and sensitive information.

The ChoiceStream study, based on US citizens, found that 62% of people were worried about divulging personal data to obtain personalised services, almost unchanged from the 63% in 2005. But the number of people willing to provide personal information to get personalised services was 57%, up from 46% in 2005. Similarly, the number of people willing to let sites track their clicks and purchases (including in https areas) was 43%, up from 32% in 2005).

The important lesson here is to be careful about the question we ask and the interpretation we put on answers. Choice based questions, where respondents make trade-offs are likely to correctly predict the sort of apparent paradox shown by the ChoiceStream report. People’s preference is for privacy, but the value they place on they preference is very low, and is readily traded-off to gain other more interesting benefits.

Panopticon Society

A post by kdawson on Slashdot uses the terms Panopticon Society, a term we might need to become more familiar with. The cause of the post was a story that the UK police are experimenting with fitting 8 mini-cameras to police officers helmets, to provide 360 degree video recording of incidents. The post links this innovation to the growth in CCTV and systems such as the ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition), to point out that we are increasingly being watched by people we can’t see. Part of the electronic wave I have written about before. For example, at the moment the UK Information Commissioner has estimated that there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK, one for every fourteen people, and the average person is captured on CCTV 300 times a day.

So, the panopticon society? The Panopticon was an idea for a prison designed by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1749-1832). The following definition is from Wikipedia
“The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a ‘sentiment of an invisible omniscience’.

The architectural figure ‘incorporates a tower central to an annular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells [...] are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also mazelike connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer’.”.

Bentham’s prison was never built in his lifetime, but there are prisons around the world modelled on Bentham’s ideas.

I do not know whether kdawson coined the term Panopticon Soceity (a Google search of “Panopticon Society” records 1,640 occurrences), or heard it elsewhere, but it seems to me a very apt phrase. We are all on view, and we can never be sure whether, at any given moment, we are being watched.