We are generating so much information every day that we don’t even know what it is being recorded about us. I just checked on Google for my name and found 184,000 pointers. Clearly they will be many that are not about me (I just made random sampling up to the 100th page and with just few exceptions they were about me).

What struck me as funny (or is it not funny) is that a good percentage of these pointers were about something I did that I have now forgotten. Thinking about it and following the link I had to admit that, yes, I did it!

A smiling ghost making your content disappear after a little while!

I also thought that I do not know what 99% of the information linked by those pointers are actually saying….

Yes, I have the feeling that I have lost control about myself in the digital space.

Another thing that came to my mind is that the web has change the way we communicate in the sense that nothing fades away (although it gets buried in those 184,000 links…). And this thought was prompted by an article I read.

Indeed, the article points out that even for the information I generate of my own will I cannot control it once I circulate it on the web. Place a photo on Facebook, send a tweet…. it is there forever! Even those places that let you delete the information may be captured by crawlers (like the ones sent out by the WaybackMachine) and reappear in other places. I still remember British Telecom publishing a wrong information on new tariff and removing it after just few minutes. It was too late. That info had already been captured by crawlers and people could still access to it and blame BT for a breach of promise!

A new company, Snapchat, is providing you the tools to attach a time of survival for an information you place on the web and takes care of erasing it once the time goes by. There are now 100 million photos and text messages that destroy themselves, courtesy of Snapchat, every day! They are ghosts that appear for some fleeting moments (e.g. 10 seconds) and then they are gone forever.

The system is not foolproof. A person looking at your photo can make a screen capture and you no longer have control on it. Although Snapchat will let you know that the photo has been copied by xyz there is little you can do about it.

DuckDuckGo

And, of course, if instead of making a screen capture that bad guy takes a photo of your photo….well, you won’t even know he did it!

So the problem is far from being solved but I found 100 million information going through Snapchat as a clear indication that people feel the need to be somehow in control and to be able to NOT record something they do!

Similarly, the success of the DuckDuckGo search engine that makes the promise not to record what you have been looking for is another indication that people wish, from time to time, to preserve their privacy.

DuckDuckGo has already served over 400 million search requests, an average of over 1.5 million a day. Of course nothing compared to the over 3 billions search each day by Google…, but still a lot of people do not know, yet, about DuckDuckGo, and many have said by clicking on it that they do care about privacy!

Too bad that no foolproof solution is in sight!

Google has announced the availability of their glasses to people wising to develop applications. If you are based in the US you can send them a request along with 1,500$, as deposit, indicating what kind of apps you wish to develop. Once approved you’ll get the glasses and within 6 months you should show them your app. If turns up as you promised they will give you back 1,300$ and you can keep the glasses.

We can expect many people starting to work with them and I wonder what kind of apps they are thinking about. Clearly most will be along the line of augmented reality.

But what if, and no if I guess, somebody will develop a very simple app that just records what is going on as you walk around, and what if many people will be using it?

We will be living in an ambient where all our whereabouts are recorded, like having millions of security cameras with the twist that the recording are no longer kept private.

One person wearing the glasses may of course use this app to record her own life, a sort of myLifebits -remember the project? – but at the same time having thousands of people in your area recording “their” life bits will end up in having “your” life bits recorded as well.

And who is to stop these thousands people in publishing “their” life bits on Facebook, along with “ours”? And who can say that somebody will not develop an app to scavenge the web to collect our life bits?

Privacy is going to become very difficult to control….

Following last year founding of the Big Data Initiative at the MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) a number of fall out initiatives are stemming out to leverage the potential of Big Data in many areas. One of these, claimed to become a major force in reshaping health care, is the one initiated by the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Big Medical Data.

ICT is clearly a major force in Health Care today, permeating all of its processes and value chains, from hospital management to surgical procedures, from planning cure protocols to pharmaceutical research.

The stereotype image of a doctor with a stethoscope is now morphing into the one on the left. A tablet in the hand is as common as the stethoscope on the neck.

The pervasiveness of ICT in medicine practice is becoming self fuelling: by having more sensors to monitor patients, and don’t forget the future ones embedded in pills, clothes and blankets, a ubiquitous connectivity that can harvest data and continuously enrich the world wide medical experience it is just inevitable that new research will lead to ways of exploiting the hidden knowledge of this ever growing data set. Welcome to Big Medical Data.

The issues to be tackled are many and common to most area where we deal with the extraction of information form heterogeneous data sets. Some are just technical, i.e. how to organise data in an efficient way or how to share them, others are fraught with ethical implications like issues on privacy and the balance of the rights of the single person vs the benefit to a community, others have strong economical and biz implications like the ownership of data, what is the meaning of value creation when we are in the digital world and so on. It just happens that all these issues peak when you are dealing with Medical Data. Everything becomes more thorny and the challenges, potential damage and benefits bigger.

This is an area where cooperation is important and needs to involve both shareholders (those that are investing to get a return on their investment) and stakeholders (those that are part of the value chain and that will be affected, one way or another, by the deployment of innovation).

According to a famous quote of Martin Luther King

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem

This is surely the case as we push the envelope of science and technology beyond today’s frontiers.

MRI image of what’s going on in the brain is leading to an understanding of what is going on in the mind…

Technology is now approaching the point where we can read the mind, look at electrical signals flowing in the brain and decode the thoughts flowing in that mind.

For as long as we go back in time human beings have struggled to grasp what the mind was and most philosophers came to the conclusion that the mind is separate from the physical body although some relations were felt to exist (acting on the body can influence the mind and working on the mind you can influence the body…).

Nowadays science has clearly shown that the mind is just an expression of the physical processes going on in the body, mostly in the brain. The scientific demonstration are beyond doubts.

Having proved this fact the next step is to derive information on the mind by looking at the brain. And indeed we can see more and more what’s going on in the brain and we are learning to correlate these chemical-electrical processes to thoughts and emotions.

Science (and technology) is already able to detect thoughts like: rise the hand, move left, and so on and actuate them through a robot (or robotic prosthetics). Studies have been fuelled with the goal to help people suffering from palsy or to increase reactivity of military pilots.

There is little doubts among scientists that within this decade the range of thoughts that we will be able to detect by observing the brain will expand dramatically.

Observation tools so far are cumbersome and require the willing acceptance by the person whose brain is being observed but in the next twenty years this may change and tools for detection at a distance will become feasible.

This is going to open up a full can of worms with issues on privacy that will make today’s concern on privacy a child play!

There is still time to  understand this problem and take measures. And this is what Matthew Liao, who defines himself as a neuroethicist, is doing.

He is looking at questions like: Do people own their own memories?

Today such a question seems moot! But think about a time when implanted brain chip can harvest memories (or store them as they are being created) and might transfer these memories to a Facebook page. Who is really going to own such a memory?

Amazing, and scaring!

As I was looking on the web for an image of an RFID tag I could include in my post yesterday I stumble onto this cartoon, that made me smile and … think!

Have you ever start thinking of the implication of having a cell phone?
A cell phone is a very sophisticated RFID, a device that can identify you and let the “system” follow you every single day through every moment of your life.

And this information can be easily correlated to understand what are your whereabouts, what are your friends, what you do on free time, even the type of person you are: do you get nervous often? are you a chatty character?…

And still, even though you would be the first to react adversely at the idea of someone wanting to “tag” you and potentially knowing something about you, you are accepting your cell phone and actually you’ll feel lost without it!

It is not just a matter of “presenting” (or marketing) things as the cartoon suggest. I think it is more complex than that.

Our metrics are based on the perceived usefulness, and also on the level of trust we have, and feel.

Network Operators are usually trusted parties and we feel they will not use the knowledge they have (or might have by processing te data our cell phone provides) to our detriment. This is something that, I think, Network Operator should capitalise by providing each of us with even more services that can be derived by those date we are so willing (or not upset) to provide.
And the more service, the more attention paid to privacy, the more the trust will grow and even more services will be possible to deliver. And this is just what an Information Society should be all about!

In a few commentaries on this blog I offered the view that data can be a currency. Everybody agrees that data have value so one should be able to attach a price to them.

It says it all!

This is what some companies are starting to do, using technology that makes this possible.

The image I have posted has been taken from the web page of Personal, a start up that aims at providing to  individuals the possibility of monetizing their personal data.

This is what they say about themselves:

“Personal enables individuals to own, control access to and benefit from their personal information bouncing around the digital world…The startup’s over-the-top ambition is to disrupt the online business model.”

You should really take a look at their web site and explore the concept and how it is translated into services. You can also try it out by yourself and see if you like it!  It remains to be seen if it would really be possible to generate significant revenues out to this as it is discussed on a blog today in Technology Review.

It is just happening and Telecom Operators may be losing a big opportunity if they are not acting fast.

Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall revise part 563 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, to require, beginning with model year 2015, that new passenger motor vehicles sold in the United States be equipped with an event data recorder that meets the requirements under that part.

It was not a problem for Fred and Barney

That is the Senate Bill 1813, beginning of Section 31406,  approved in March by the US Senate making mandatory to install on any new car a black box to register all car movements (and crashes…).

Its consequences can be enormous and may eventually change the way we perceive our vehicle. It is just applicable to US, of course, but we have seen how innovations there tend to spread to other parts of the world.

The US legislators understand of course the privacy implications and say, in the same section:

• (A) a court authorizes retrieval of the information in furtherance of a legal proceeding; 

  (B) the owner or lessee consents to the retrieval of the information for any purpose, including the purpose of diagnosing, servicing, or repairing the motor vehicle;

  (C) the information is retrieved pursuant to an investigation or inspection authorized under section 1131(a) or 30166 of title 49, United States Code, and the personally identifiable information of the owner, lessee, or driver of the vehicle and the vehicle identification number is not disclosed in connection with the retrieved information; or

  (D) the information is retrieved for the purpose of determining the need for, or facilitating, emergency medical response in response to a motor vehicle crash.

(1) OWNERSHIP OF DATA- Any data in an event data recorder required under part 563 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, regardless of when the passenger motor vehicle in which it is installed was manufactured, is the property of the owner, or in the case of a leased vehicle, the lessee of the passenger motor vehicle in which the data recorder is installed.

(2) PRIVACY- Data recorded or transmitted by such a data recorder may not be retrieved by a person other than the owner or lessee of the motor vehicle in which the recorder is installed unless–

So, in a way we might feel that the bad implications are being taken care of but a few people have started to argue that this bill is NOT a good idea.

I have to say I really have mixed feelings. I probably would rather go for a system that forces my car to avoid any accident, even if that would make it comply with all speed limits, stops and obey just pure “common sense”. And, to take it a point further, I would probably prefer a self driving car!

How many times did you call your wife in a mall to find where she ended up (or vice versa)? It happens to all the time.

Now there is these system by Navizon that is exploiting WiFi localization on the assumption that people leave the WiFi on, on their smart phone.

Take a look at system in action:

By triangulation Navizon spots the smart phone

To work it requires a number of WiFi antennas spread around the place, and this is reasonable assumption in a large space like a mall. By triangulation it can achieve a remarkable precision on where a smart phone is (and the purse holding it). The app uses this information to guide you to interception, with a user interface that really reminds of the radar.

This apps just show the many things that can be done with a smartphone. May be you might wish this app not to be on your wife smart phone if you are trying to hide yourself in the vastness of the mall, but those are the downturns of technology.

Beyond jockeying, it is clear that privacy issues go hand in hand with localization services and in this case there is now opt out solution. Either you switch it off (at least the WiFi part) or you can be tracked.

Just two weeks ago I posted a news on the adoption of a camcorder mounted on the frame of glasses used by police in the USA to record visually an action, with a system provided by Taser.

Cool sunglasses with camcorder embedded

Now, I run across another company, Pivothead, that is about to release sunglasses with an embedded camera letting you “to videotape” high definition clips for two hours and then download them to your computer, or post them on YouTube.

As you can see in the picture, on the left frame you have the activation buttons. You can take stills (4 Mpixels) or video clips up to high definition and up to two hours. And it costs you less than 350$, not that much more than a good, fancy pair of sun glasses.

You can really say that live video recording is coming to mainstream. In a few years we will have many more wearable embedding a camcorder and we will take for granted to video tape our lives. And we will have to adjust to the idea of our actions being recorded and … posted on the web. Creepy!

And the few first releases of these glasses are already generating videos for a special channel on YouTube, take a look at one of these video-clip that has been posted (just click on the movie to be taken to the PivotHead YouTube Channel):

A team of researchers at Columbia University in New York have published a study where they visualize the map of the greater New York area showing the energy use of single building. Play with the figure below to get a feeling of it.

These kinds of visualization are interesting since they provide an intuitive way of appreciating the phenomena. We will be able to have more and more representations of a variety of phenomena leveraging on the huge quantity and variety of data that are made available. Power utilities are installing digital meters and they can provide an amazing quantity of information. You can actually sort out the various use of the energy at the level of the appliance, since each one has its own digital signature.

Here again, as everywhere we are dealing with Big Data, privacy issues surface and they need to be addressed.