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brown university
Would You Trade Your Privacy for a Smartphone?
Yes, you say? Then you're in the same boat as the one hundred MIT students who voluntarily gave up their privacy for free smartphones.
The students are participating in new research project tracking a web of information called "collective intelligence." This data is comprised of all the digital interactions and linkages the students will make, tracked through their smartphones.
Every song they listen to, every Web site they visit, every file they download will be recorded and relayed to a central computer which will create a map of their activity.
The 100 students in the study are providing research fodder on a micro-level: demonstrating social and technological interaction within a college dorm. The data from their phones will create a dynamic look at the dorm's "social network."
Sound a little too Big Brother-y for your tastes? You're not the only one. Even the people who developed the software acknowledge that it has the potential to do some serious harm. Collective intelligence could potentially allow people to format profiles on individuals without ever tracking an individual directly. Technology now allows for the analysis of massive amounts of data that can show general trends, yielding results for an entire group of people, based off one person's activity.
Rather than relying on survey respondents to track trends, analysts can now use more reliable and accurate metrics from collective intelligence pools to predict things from the next hot night club to the future of the stock market. The field of collective intelligence also has potential implications for insurance coverage and response time to health epidemics.
Using the "PageRank" algorithm that made Google famous as a starting point, analysts can begin to predict people's wants and needs based on their usage of certain technologies. Smartphones, cell phones, and GPS systems are just the beginning, showing how, when, where and how often people are using their technology. By creating blanket analyses, researchers can begin to formulate a picture of people's general wants and needs, and what they will want and need next.
I'm not sure I'd be willing to let researchers track my every phone call and text message for a year... but I do want a new smartphone. Maybe THEY already knew that.
The students are participating in new research project tracking a web of information called "collective intelligence." This data is comprised of all the digital interactions and linkages the students will make, tracked through their smartphones.
Every song they listen to, every Web site they visit, every file they download will be recorded and relayed to a central computer which will create a map of their activity.
The 100 students in the study are providing research fodder on a micro-level: demonstrating social and technological interaction within a college dorm. The data from their phones will create a dynamic look at the dorm's "social network."
Sound a little too Big Brother-y for your tastes? You're not the only one. Even the people who developed the software acknowledge that it has the potential to do some serious harm. Collective intelligence could potentially allow people to format profiles on individuals without ever tracking an individual directly. Technology now allows for the analysis of massive amounts of data that can show general trends, yielding results for an entire group of people, based off one person's activity.
Rather than relying on survey respondents to track trends, analysts can now use more reliable and accurate metrics from collective intelligence pools to predict things from the next hot night club to the future of the stock market. The field of collective intelligence also has potential implications for insurance coverage and response time to health epidemics.
Using the "PageRank" algorithm that made Google famous as a starting point, analysts can begin to predict people's wants and needs based on their usage of certain technologies. Smartphones, cell phones, and GPS systems are just the beginning, showing how, when, where and how often people are using their technology. By creating blanket analyses, researchers can begin to formulate a picture of people's general wants and needs, and what they will want and need next.
I'm not sure I'd be willing to let researchers track my every phone call and text message for a year... but I do want a new smartphone. Maybe THEY already knew that.
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