(Fool's) Gold in Data Mining Our Society

Following the al-Qaeda attacks in 2001, United States officials scrambled to plan for future catastrophes. High on the list of suspected targets was California's Golden Gate Bridge. Were terrorists to destroy the passageway between San Francisco and Marin County, how widespread would the fallout be? To answer the this question, the Department of Homeland Security turned to Microsoft offshoot Inrix, the self-described "leading provider of real-time, historical and predictive traffic information."

Inrix utilizes GPS-enabled mobile phones and tracking devices installed on commercial vehicles to monitor traffic conditions. Typically marketed to public and private consumers in need of trafic information, Inrix focused their methods on the area surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge. After an analysis of the patterns, they determined that the loss of the nearly two-mile long bridge would initially result in traffic chaos, though surprisingly it would more or less return to normal sometime during days two and four after the incident.

This procedure of data collection and analysis is called "reality mining." It is the study of human interaction based on the GPS information of mobile phones and other portable, network-enabled devices. Researchers have found that they can get a more accurate picture of what, where, when and with whom people do things from a device they carry than they can from more subjective sources (such as what people say about themselves). Data has shown that people may lie, but positional signals don't. Seemingly-ubiquitous cell phones and PDA's not only log calls, messages and whereabouts, but with Bluetooth the phone can also keep tabs on one's proximity to other holders of similar phones. As more people use wireless handsets to make purchases, the phone gathers data on spending patterns, too. This information can be put to public use (as seen in Inrix's catastrophe assessment), or studied for commercial use.

Alex Kass of Accenture notes that "companies can use data on a sample population over a given period—say, a week or a month—and then assume some of them are sick, to provide a more accurate picture of how widely an illness could spread. Information on a particular individual or group could help build more accurate models to predict how an illness spreads from one person to another." Nathan Eagle, a research scientist at the MIT Design Laboratory, asserts that wireless companies could use the information to help keep customers from switching to a rival through identifying "influencers," those who use their phone the most. Not only are these subscribers valuable for their personal volume of calls, but they're also more likely to influence other people's service and product purchases, as well as take customers with them when they switch.

Reality mining has useful applications, but does that make it okay? Guilherme Roschke, an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., has stated that "while reality mining may have legitimate uses, there is also the potential for abuse." There is the fear of being monitored without consent, as well as of personal information being stored for foreign parties to examine.

As we become more attached to the Web we see our privacy diminish, so where do we draw the line? A Zogby International poll in late 2007 found that 18% of Americans would feel comfortable implanting tracking devices on their children and that 11% of Americans are not averse to brain implants that have access to the Internet. I don't know about you, but an Internet-enabled device that had access to my thoughts, while useful, is also disturbing. With many agreeing to movement and trend tracking, we see human privacy lessening every year. The underlying question is this: What are the new rules? With privacy slowly becoming a relic of the past, how much information will we allow others to gather? Sure, some argue that "if you're not doing anything wrong then you don't have anything to fear," but who decides what is wrong? As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Thus, we must go forth with care. Action ought to be taken to secure that all data is anonymous and that is destroyed as soon as it is no longer useful.


Poll data:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/poll_us_attitudes_about_intern_1.php