Things in Context

"The message of behavioral economics is simple: people are susceptible to decision bias, which often makes it hard for them to make self-beneficial choices. Thus, we should present choices in a way that helps people to make self-beneficial choices and understand the implications of their decisions as well—all without restricting their freedom of choice"..."Researchers in context-aware technology have been designing applications that can sense the current activity of people and learn their routines over time.”[1]



Sources:

[1] Lee, Min Kyung, Sara Kiesler, and Jodi Forlizzi. "Mining behavioral economics to design persuasive technology for healthy choices." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2011.

Behavioral Economics and Persuasive Technology

Behavioral economics, a term that has increased in use in scholarly papers in the past few years, is a study that looks at human behavior and the effects of psychological, social, cognitive, and emotional factors to explain economic decision-making. [2] This school of thought maintains an assumption that humans are irrational and that there is one way to be rational and many ways to be irrational, implying that some people know better than others. If humans are irrational, then who is the sheriff of rationality—who deems what a rational choice is? In an excerpt from a paper [on behavioral economics] from Carnegie Melon University there is a prime example of how some technologies are used to try and nudge users into “better” behavior:

Many researchers have investigated ways to use technology to convince people to adopt healthy or sustainable lifestyles. One of the most common approaches has been to use information and feedback to encourage behavioral change. By inducing users to set goals and providing them with feedback about their current behavior, this approach seeks to increase people’s awareness about an issue and to encourage them to change their behavior. [1]

In this paper titled “Mining Behavioral Economics to Design Persuasive Technology for Healthy Choices” the authors make note of the increasing role of information technology in peoples’ daily lives, and that people already make decisions on many things (e.g., which route to take, which restaurant to go to, etc.) based on the information presented to them by their information technology device (smart phone). It has an optimistic tone, similar to that in Nedelchev's article (mentioned in my last post) in that it speaks towards a "better" tomorrow (healthy eating habits in this case) for an individual affected by their use of information technology. Clearly there are advantages to having access to the information that people are taking in. By accessing what information people are putting out, which is more and more doable in an information technology, Internet of Things-world their patterns can be perceived and so specific information can be implanted into those patterns in order to influence them. In the case of this paper, the authors are researching methods the get users to make decisions towards healthier eating habits.

Of the many ways technology can be used to convince people to behave a certain way, one of the methods mentioned in Lee et al. is the use of information and feedback: "By inducing users to set goals and providing them with feedback about their current behavior…" In terms of goals and feedback, this is much like the gamification of apps, where a user might be rewarded points for completing a health goal or posting something on Facebook that other users with like. A more widely-used, formal definition of gamification is “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts,” as stated by Deterding et al. in 2011. [4]

Lee et al., in their paper, go on to suggest an alternative approach to the feedback loop that is “drawn from the field of behavioral economics." Generally, they focus on promoting “healthy snacking in the workplace”, and it discusses “designs” that apply behavioral-economic persuasion techniques through persuasive technology to make it happen. The combination of these topics raises some interesting questions as to how “smart” technologies can influence people and how the bulk-collection of data plays into this. Could our own data, recorded and sold through and by social networks, service providers, and device manufacturers be used to influence our decisions when we refer to technology for assistance? Are the developers behind persuasive technologies collecting more information about the users than they [the users] are aware of?



Sources:

[1] Lee, Min Kyung, Sara Kiesler, and Jodi Forlizzi. "Mining behavioral economics to design persuasive technology for healthy choices." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2011.
 
[2] Schrepel, Thibault. "Behavioral Economics in U.S. (antitrust) Scholarly Papers." Web log post. Le Concurrentialiste. N.p., 23 Apr. 2014. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.
 
[3] Dey, Anind K. "Understanding and using context." Personal and ubiquitous computing 5.1 (2001): 4-7.
 
[4] Deterding, Sebastian, et al. "Gamification. using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts." CHI'11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2011.

The Internet of Things: many perspectives and many uncertainties

The internet has evolved from connecting computers to connecting actual “things”; these are physical objects that contain internal sensors and processors which enable the object to record and stream data directly to the web—and in real-time; the goal being to create seamless, ubiquitous communications.

This essentially describes the Internet of Things (IoT), or the Internet of Everything (IoE), as Plamen Nedeltchev refers to it in his article titled "The Internet of Everything is the New Economy" published on website of Cisco Systems, Inc. Nedeltchev ("Ph.D., Distinguished IT Engineer, Cisco") describes IoE as a future that is already here, and says that it is "potentially the biggest business opportunity in the history of mankind." He says that by the end of 2013 the IoE market had a value approximately at $1.3 trillion, and over the next 20 years "could add as much as $15 trillion to the global gross domestic product."

What is this new "IoE Economy" that Nedeltchev is speaking towards, and how is different than our current and past economic system?

Besides the economic interests of technology companies, Nedeltchev also speaks towards the question of how IoE will affect our daily lives (i.e., cars, energy, healthcare, etc.). He goes on to briefly speak on the topics of security and privacy, but does not seemed to concerned as he says, "That's to be expected. As it is said, 'Every challenge is an opportunity in disguise.' And most often, big opportunities come from addressing big challenges." This sounds like the flowery language of a political candidate up for re-election. A candidate is selling themselves, but in this case Cisco is selling "the Internet of Everything", and they clearly already have their foot in the door. They even make a short video that is like a smooth and visually appealing power-point presentation (below).

 

When considering the larger technological structure at the background of the everyday devices that have already catalyzed a societal transformation Nedeltchev's article clearly shows a more specific perspective in this new paradigm of the Internet of Things. He speaks of utopian prospect from an IoE economy, and says, "Although we may never solve world hunger, in this new economy, some aspects of utopia could likely become reality." 

In another article, published in the Guardian entitled "Hacked dog, a car that snoops on you and a fridge full of adverts: the perils of the internet of things" author Marc Goodman gives a perspective that is very different than that of Nedeltchev's article. Goodman walks through some of the background and history of the Internet of Things and then goes on to paint a picture of what an IoT world will look like. He speaks towards the subject in a prospective tone, similar to Nedeltchev, but in a more urgent tone; he says that, "while there is undoubtedly big money to be made in the IoT, its social implications may even outstrip its economic impact." He more clearly shows his skepticism of the promises that the IoT future holds when he says:

As we venture down the path toward ubiquitous computing, the results and implications of the phenomenon are likely to be mind-blowing. Just as the introduction of electricity was astonishing in its day, it eventually faded into the background, becoming an imperceptible, omnipresent medium in constant interaction with the physical world. Before we let this happen, and for all the promise of the IoT, we must ask critically important questions about this brave new world. For just as electricity can shock and kill, so too can billions of connected things networked online.

If there is a question about a person's vulnerability, with regard to security and privacy in an IoT world, who will people invest their trust in? One major point in Goodman's article is the "hackability", so to speak, of the communications technologies that make up ( and will inevitably make up) the landscape of IoT. He says, "Before we add billions of hackable things and communicate with hackable data transmission protocols, important questions must be asked about the risks for the future of security, crime, terrorism, warfare and privacy." 

Goodman draws a distinction between the physical and non-physical aspects of the communications technologies that make up the IoT landscape. The non-physical elements are things like radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies (like those found in security IDs or many credit cards), near-field communication (NFC) technologies (mobile payment services like Google Wallet utilize this), and Bluetooth communications. All of these have security vulnerabilities just as the physical elements of computer systems: "including the microchips, electronics, controllers, memory, circuits, components, transistors and sensors--core elements of the internet of things." 

Using this distinction between the physical and non-physical components of communication technologies, Goodman makes an analogy to aspects of our own lives that are physical and non-physical, and he points out that everything we do online--our activities, or our "bread crumb trails"--can already be tracked, stored, and sold. This online presence would be the 'non-physical' aspect of the analogy, which becomes clear when Goodman asserts that with "the widespread adoption of more networked devices, what people do in their homes, cars,workplaces, schools and communities will be subjected to increased monitoring and analysis by the corporations making these devices." Just as our online movements can be tracked, IoT is making it possible to do the same in the physical world. As for the near future, Goodman says that "Real space will become just like cyberspace."

Will individuals be able to choose not to participate in a super-connected world of the Internet of Things? For those who choose to "stay off the grid", will they be able to interact and function with the rest of society without submitting to surveillance, personal data collection, and terms of service agreements?

Data, Surveillance, and a Broader Approach to Understanding

We are amidst a technological revolution with an unclear and rapidly approaching future. As this future becomes a tangible and very physical reality, what follows is a new marketplace of information and interaction with smart technology as the medium of exchange. There are new players and new risks. Gary Kovac, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, says that the internet has opened up a new world to us, but our privacy is the price that we are more and more being asked to pay for this connectedness. He elaborates on this point in a TED Talk from February 2012 titled “Tracking our online trackers”:

Today, what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place; it's not. And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods. We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, our financial histories, and on and on it goes.

Image Source: Flickr

Kovac says that sharing data is not necessarily a bad thing when the data being shared is done so after giving consent, but he says a problem arises when “I don’t know and when I haven’t been asked[explicitly for consent]...It's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking, and it is very big business.” He goes on to say, “I am being stalked across the Web. And why is this happening? Pretty simple -- it's huge business. The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today.”

But it is not just businesses who have an interest in collecting large amounts of data about individuals and their habits. The Edward Snowden leaks have shown us that government also has been collecting large amounts of personal data--foreign and domestic--and done so without public knowledge or consent. The first of these leaked documents to be published by the Guardian was a top secret court order, which the Guardian says showed for the first time that "under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing." The data being collected under this order is called "metadata": data that describes data –information about the time and location of a phone call or email, but not the actual contents of that message. Here is an excerpt from the Verizon Court Order for “telephony metadata”:

Telephony metadata includes comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call. (page 2) 

This is just the first stop on a long trail of government surveillance and the collection of "metadata". To be able to address issues like privacy rights and government secrecy we must first take a step back and look at the broader picture of the environment that this is all happening in and the way technology has shaped it. Perhaps the real questions transcend the familiar push and pull between people and government or corporations.

How is today any different from the way things have been in the past?

 

‘Data’ is not a new concept to humanity. It is the building blocks of information and knowledge. Surveillance and government secrecy are not new things either. What is new is technology and the ways that humans can use technology in order to process and analyze data at a rate and volume unimaginable in the past. We can collect more real-time data and in more ways than ever before.

Tiny wireless sensor (CC3000 Module Internals). Source: Flickr

There is a term known as "the Internet of Things". It was originally coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, executive director of the Auto-ID Center at MIT. The Internet of Things (IoT) described a ubiquitous computing paradigm: an emerging paradigm for interaction between humans and computers in a world where more and more computing capabilities are showing up everywhere and anywhere. It is essentially a network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity that enable it to exchange data with the manufacturers, the users and/or other connected devices. Our "smart" phones are some of these objects. In a paper that was prepared for the 1st Berlin Symposium on Internet and Society the authors, when exploring definitions of IoT, say that "it is possible to consider the internet of things as the superset of all objects that are uniquely identifiable by electro-magnetic means and for which it is possible to specify a semantic and/or behavior.”[1]

What is the "Internet of Things"? How is it already a reality; how will it, how has it, and how could it change our society?

The difficulty in asking these questions is that there are many terms besides and surrounding "the Internet of Things" that describe changes that people are aware of. There are many perspectives at different levels and scales with regard to seeing and shaping this future. 

[1] Van Kranenburg, Rob, et al. "The Internet of things." A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID, Network Notebooks 2 (2011).