Reality Mining

December 1, 2008 1:19 AM

"Reality mining is just like data mining... except instead of being applied to text and web pages... we're trying to find patterns in real life." MIT students "swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails."

Alex "Sandy" Pentland tracks how humans interact by looking at the trails left by the devices they use. This movie (.mov file) shows a little of what he's up to. Could the accelerometer in your iPhone detect a change in your gait, which can be an early indicator of Parkinson's? Maybe cell phone data could be used to track the spread of diseases like SARS.

Thomas Malone, another researcher at MIT, thinks we might be overly-focused on privacy: “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.”

posted by tractorfeed (12 comments total)

I've been reading "Honest Signals"... and it's a pretty fascinating read. It's the "Black Swan" of this Holiday season, at any rate...
posted by ph00dz at 2:37 AM on December 1, 2008

My Grandpa was a reality miner. He died during the Great Reality Cave-in of '08.
posted by twoleftfeet at 2:59 AM on December 1, 2008 [6 favorites]

I could get the same info from reading the blogs of college students or anyone. There's really only thing to be gained from reality mining - the cold hard conclusion that nobody realizes that their life is immensely boring while they're living it.
posted by allen.spaulding at 3:01 AM on December 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,”

Yeah, but that knowledge worked two ways - you also knew what everybody else was doing - and that was especially true for the village elders. Unfortunately, the "global village" is asymmetrical, you don't know your leaders are doing, and you have no way of finding out.

And do you know what that Homeland Security officer is doing with your data? Bring back symmetrical knowledge, and indeed privacy is less of an issue.
posted by DreamerFi at 4:20 AM on December 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

Hmm, that Honest Signals book does look great, but...

Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge—a "sociometer"—to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people

was he deliberately trying to set himself up for a thousand lonely-nerd jokes? He needs to calibrate the wedgiedar on that thing.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:07 AM on December 1, 2008

Yeah, but that knowledge worked two ways - you also knew what everybody else was doing - and that was especially true for the village elders. Unfortunately, the "global village" is asymmetrical, you don't know your leaders are doing, and you have no way of finding out.

Exactly.
posted by delmoi at 6:11 AM on December 1, 2008

Based on my analysis of patterns in reality I am forced to conclude that Dr. Pentland reads Wired and understand how to linkbait.
posted by srboisvert at 8:12 AM on December 1, 2008

Interesting stuff, but two pages into the first chapter of Honest Signals and he mentions "fitness of the species". I'm continuing on, but it makes me wonder what else he doesn't get.
posted by AceRock at 8:56 AM on December 1, 2008

Unfortunately, the "global village" is asymmetrical, you don't know your leaders are doing, and you have no way of finding out.

This is something I've thought about a lot. And sometimes I wonder if the best way to combat Homeland Security's access to private information is to render that information useless by making it public. I'd be willing to give the public read-only access to 99% of my email and nearly all of my phone calls. If people made their info public en masse, it would be trivial for internet dogooders to find out why Joe Blow got detained at airport security, and hold the government accountable.
posted by roll truck roll at 11:59 AM on December 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

To follow up on DreamerFi's point, it isn't just an issue of asymmetric knowledge, it's asymmetric power. Let's say your insurance company looks at this kind of data and discovers that, say, you're at increased risk for heart attack because you eat a lot of big macs. As a consequence, they raise your premiums or maybe even deny you coverage. It doesn't matter if it's public record that the CEO of the insurance company likes to snort cocaine off of prostitutes' naked bodies -- your insurance premiums are still high, and you can't do anything about it.
posted by Alterscape at 12:34 PM on December 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

I'd be willing to give the public read-only access to 99% of my email and nearly all of my phone calls.

But wouldn't that make that 1% you choose not to disclose all that much more desirable? You'd just be picking out the juicy bits for whomever wants to bypass your guaranteed-insecure protections.
posted by bkudria at 11:13 PM on December 1, 2008

Good point.
posted by roll truck roll at 9:15 AM on December 2, 2008