December 01, 2008
Collective Intelligence
An emerging field called collective intelligence describes a vast volume of digital information that is being recorded by an ever expanding web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. When this is combined with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, our digital identity can tell a lot about us.
A recent NY Times article describes 100 M.I.T. freshmen who, in exchange for a free smartphone, allowed researchers to track their every move. So when they dial another student, researchers know. When they send an e-mail or text message, they also know. When they listen to music, they know the song. Every moment that they have the smartphone with them, they know where each one is, and who is nearby. They have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.
According to the article, "propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize." But, everyone acknowledges that if this knowledge is misused, "collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of."
Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology.
Everyday technologies have become so powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.
Using Behavior to Influence Technology and Vice-Versa
"GOOGLE and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.
The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November, initially for the Apple iPhone, that gains its accuracy in large part from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that its users have entered in the last decade. In the future, Google will take advantage of spoken queries to predict even more accurately the questions its users will ask.
And, a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.
The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.
A company called Sense Networks has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone, and the other for companies interested in forecasting social trends and financial behavior. The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.
The second application, Macrosense, is intended to give businesses insight into human activities. It uses a vast database that merges GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency identification chips and other sensors.
The metrics are changing allowing companies to look at things that no one has ever measured previously. Shopping patterns within stores can be measured and if we combine these travel patterns with data on incomes, retailers can gain insights into sales levels and who is shopping at competitors’ stores.
The M.I.T. students aren't concerned about losing their privacy as the researchers have convinced them that they have gone to great lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that would reveal their identities. Anyway, they all have Facebook pages, e-mail, websites and and blogs.
So do we need to re-define privacy? Perhaps
According to Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence, 'the new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,for most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew. In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.
In 1999, Scott McNealy, the chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said "consumer privacy issues are a "red herring". You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence
Electronic Privacy Information Center
Posted by rsk at December 1, 2008 11:03 AM