Reality Mining

The MIT Technology Review recently published its annual 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008.

One of the more interesting - and frightening - developments that I saw was the concept of Reality Mining, being developed by Sandy Pentland at MIT.

As Professor Pentland says, reality mining "is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people--basically, to help you live your life."

"To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week."

The fact that, unbeknown to me, my life could be digitally modeled, mapped, and replicated is a bit off-putting. Social networks are great, and I see the societal value that they add. But the implications of having unsecured analysis of my personal interactions, travel, conversation, and consumption are, to say the least, a serious reality check.