The Virtual Self by Young Nora

Author:Young, Nora [Sconosciuto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2012-04-09T22:00:00+00:00

THEY SEE YOU WHEN YOU’RE SLEEPING; THEY KNOW WHEN YOU’RE AWAKE

As I’ve suggested, digital technology has a particular character, which is that it “knows” how it’s being used. That means we’re essentially enabling the technology to track us, simply by virtue of using it. So far, we’ve mostly been concerned with our own efforts to track where we are and what we do, initiated by us, whether that’s Gordon Bell using his MyLifeBits system or your pal tracking her jogging routine. But the reality is, using much digital technology, in effect, creates the opportunity for surveillance. This is the dual meaning of “self-tracking.” How that information is stored, and who has access to it, has powerful, and even potentially dangerous, implications.

In the spring of 2011, Apple iPhone users were shocked to learn that information about their phone’s location was being stored in the phone itself. The problem was that anyone who had physical possession of your phone, and the free, downloadable software to analyze it, could figure out with some accuracy where those phones – and hence the phone’s users – had been. The justification, from Apple, at least, was pretty straightforward. In order to make the phone’s service more efficient, it was keeping a record of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers near the phone’s owner, and in any case, customers only needed to turn their Location Services function off to prevent the collection of this data. In the end, it seemed like an oversight more than anything else; location information was being transmitted to Apple every twelve hours anyway, so there was no reason to keep the data on the phone.9 I think what registered with most users, though, was not an actual fear of someone finding out where you were; it was that uncanny feeling that just by using your phone, unbeknownst to you, there was a record of, more or less, where you had been. Expect these little privacy skirmishes to become a regular occurrence in the future, as we start to realize how much information our digital devices have about us. Right now, designers and companies choose what information to keep, where to keep it, and for how long, but as we go forward into a world of passively generated data, we will need to have a public discussion about these issues. We’ve decided, for instance, that you can’t sell a car that doesn’t have safety belts or a speedometer, because we have consensus that it would be unsafe to do so. The implications of storing location information on a phone run from law enforcement forensics, to the danger of stalking, to evidence in divorce proceedings.

Beyond the question of where the data is stored is the issue of who has access to it. For Nicholas Felton, the information designer and self-tracker, it’s frustrating that the data being collected by his devices is out there but that he doesn’t have access to it:

As someone who has tracked reading, it’s something that’s quite time-consuming and a little bit frustrating to do … I’ve started reading on my iPhone.

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