Data, a double-edged sword

systematic criticism essay

Vincent Olislagers, 2011 Interaction Design Master K3, Malm Hgskola 1. NETWORKED OBJECTS

The internet of things, a name for the invisible network which allows smart objects to talk to each other using the internet and RFID technology, is starting to play an ever increasing important role in our everyday lives. According to Gigaom.com there are currently around 9 billion connected devices in existence. The global mobile industry trade group GSMA predicts that in 2020 there will be around 24 billion devices equipped for network connectivity [2]. Michael Nelson, the former director of Internet Technology at IBM even expects that within the next 5-10 years around 100 billion devices are connected to the internet. [1] Most of these devices will be smart phones or consumer electronics of another kind. A few examples of other peripheral smart devices include Karotz, a wifi-enabled plastic desktop rabbit which reads out your email for you and The Little Printer, a miniature desktop receipt printer which prints your email, messages and the weather forecast, etc. on conveniently sized strips of paper. Products like Karotz (previously Nabaztaq), and The Little Printer are entering our homes and seamlessly integrate with our everyday lifestyle. One thing these two devices have in common is that they require internet connectivity. Their sole purpose is to aggregate information; their functionality necessitates a constant stream of live data.

2. 2.1

DATA AS AN RESOURCE Data is ubiquitous

Data is everywhere and its becoming more readily available every day. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope collected more astronomical data in its first weeks of operation than had been gathered in the entire history of astronomy. [9] Moreover, civilians are as much affected by the ever surging flow of data. Mashable.com wrote back in 2010 that at the time that in every passing minute a full day worth of video was being uploaded to Youtube [10], while Twitter [11] reported earlier this year on their development blog that in all together people tweet approximately 140 billion times every day. Search engines, devoid of humanity, are nicknamed spiders crawling the web in search for fresh prey, consuming content as they go. Ironically, they can be instructed not to parse the contents of a website and add it to their databases by using the command no-robots in the header of a website. There exists a duality here; while data is often personal and confidential in large quantities it becomes a reliable resource to draw from for both commercial and political entities.

2.2

Physical data made manifest virtually

Information on the internet does not by definition directly relate to real time events in the physical world, but the gap between physical and virtual is becoming ever smaller. Sensor network services like Pachube [14] (pronounced patch-bay) and PubsubIO [15] allow their users to connect and share environmental sensors on the internet. This offers many possibilities for the internet of things

2.3

Data management & connectivity

Managing and in particular visualizing all this data is a rather cumbersome task. RSS feeds allow for separation of content from context by offering centralized aggregation of data. Yet in a Huxlian world with an excess of information, it is hard to determine which data is relevant. This is where services like Google Refine offer promising results in cleaning up large quantities of heterogeneous data for further analysis and representation. Other online services like Yahoo Pipes or DERI Pipes give users complete control on what content they are being served. Pipes are a type of hybrid customizable RSS feed which can be tailored exactly to their users needs using a node based query language. These services empower people not only in contributing information to the web, but also offer them the tools to selectively extract the data that is relevant to them.

2.4

Democratizing information

Data can be a valuable asset when made available to the right audience. One such example is Dontflush.me. The New York sewer system overflows periodically resulting in raw sewage spilling in the water of the harbor. Leif Percifeld created Dontflush.me [13], a crowd sourced pollution monitoring initiative, to alert New York systems on when these overflows happen so that they can reduce the production of waste water. Dontflush.me implements a series of sewage level sensors which are connected to Pachube. Pachube was also used after the meltdown of the Fukuchiyama Nuclear Reactor in the wake of the tsunami that hit Japan. Led by Shigeru Kobayashi the data service was used to quickly set up a network of radiation sensors [16] for crowd sourced real-time radiation monitoring of the environment of tap water. The initiative informs the local population of which areas are contaminated and serves as a live data resource on the situation for the media and the authorities. Concerned citizens have continued to contribute to the initiative by extending the sensor network with more sensors, further increasing the accuracy and resolution of the data. Live readings from the network show that in the east of Fukushima radiation levels are still alarmingly high.

Using the crowd-sourced donation platform Kickstarter [6], Marcelino Alvarez from Portland fundraised 33000 dollars for a similar project [20]. He used the funding to send Geiger counters to the Fukushima area. He describes his project in his Kickstarter project pitch: "The initial set of devices will be utilized in areas where coverage is sparse. We will deliver these devices to people on the ground who have been trained in how to use them. It could be a teacher, a university student, or a citizen scientist looking to contribute to the project.

Data retrieved from the Geiger counters will be uploaded to Safecast.org, a large crowd-sourced monitoring platform, which aggregates radiation readings from several government and non-profit sources. Additionally the readings will also be made available on Pachube for further aggregation.

3. 3.1

DATA: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD Ownership and monetization of data

It comes as no surprise that Google borrows its name from the similarly sounding googol a large number valued at 10100. It also hints at the potential and power of data, when a billion dollar multinational enterprise like Google, which does not produce or trade any physical products, can do business using just data as a trade asset. The old Roman maxim Scientia potentia es, roughly translating into knowledge is power, seems to be truer than ever. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is the testament of a similar success story. Facebook offers a free service by effectively monetizing the content which is provided by their users. By building a customer profile of their users the website is able to serve individuals personalized advertisements. Moreover, its inscrutable terms and conditions consist of a dense block of text in legal jargon informing their users that by using their service they waive all intellectual property rights on the content they post on the network. Taken directly from the content ownership section of the December 2011 version of the Facebook, the section reads [7]: For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

3.2

Identity and convenience in the balance

Googles services and Facebook widgets offer tempting functionalities in exchange for sharing data with partners and affiliates. Users, often unknowingly, forfeit their privacy while registering an account on other websites using their Google Account or by granting third party apps like games access to their Facebook profile. Mobile apps integrated with social networks allow users to update their status at any time of day from virtually any place in the world. It seems that privacy seems to become ever less important in an internet of connected things where convenience takes the center stage. A critical stance on ethical issues like suspension of privacy seems to become more difficult and perhaps futile all together: the cover page of the March 2011 issues of Time Magazine [5] read: "Your data for sale, everything about you is being tracked, get over it".

3.3

Privacy as a commodity

In an interview with Usman Haque, the founder of Pachube it was made evident that not providing but limiting access to data was the platforms core business. Haque argued that "privacy is the most valuable model" in an interview with ReadWriteWeb in October 2009 [12]. By allowing data published on free accounts to be public only they hoped that users would be willing to pay for the privilege to choose who would be allowed to listen in on their feeds (data channels).

4. 4.1

TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF DATA Open source alternatives

When it comes to social networking an alternate solution to Facebook is Diaspora [17]. Diaspora (meaning dispersion in Greek) is open source software which enables users to host content, like profiles, status updates and pictures in their own servers called pods. Since they have administrator access to their own server, permanently removing information from their profile it is as simple as removing it from the pod. The project was initially funded by donations and is now completely free. Diaspora is written in Ruby on Rails, one of the main free web frameworks available.

Claros [18] proves to be a reliable open-source alternative to Gmail. Although not as rich in features it still offers a smooth user experience without encroaching on your privacy. PubsubIO allows their users to choose between relaying data through the projects servers (called Pubhubs) or hosting their own data broker server, which allows their users to be in control of the both the client and server side architecture and choose the level of encryption of the data. Pachube also claims some rights on the data uploaded to their network, PubsubIO is however in the public domain. OpenLayers [19] offers an open source alternative to digital cartography. The project is sponsor funded and is completely free to user. It uses open source Javascript under the FreeBSD license, allowing users to user and even modify the source code freely. The source code can be downloaded from the projects Github page.

4.2

Towards an ethics of data

When users can be disowned of their intellectual property right with the click of a button and corporations make their business from exploiting personal information, we might want to rethink how we distribute our content. In a world where everything is connected, data flows freely and information is both ubiquitous and ambiguous it seems hard, however, to keep a critical view on the ethical issues concerning data distribution. Wikipedia encompassing the content of countless volumes of encyclopedic works, never before have we gained access to such a wealth of knowledge. It is not what is available but what we choose to access that seems to be under scrutiny, with the introduction of legal cases on illegal downloading and uploading of copy written material. Data seems to be a double-sided sword. One question seems to be more relevant than ever though; when it comes to the internet of things, which data do we want to be public and how can we share the data we want to share freely and publicly without relinquishing overall control, ownership and perhaps parts of our identity?

5.

SOURCES & REFERENCES

[1] http://www.thehammersmithgroup.com/images/reports/networked_objects.pdf [2] http://gigaom.com/cloud/internet-of-things-will-have-24-billion-devices-by-2020/ [3] http://apps.pachube.com/radiation/ [4] http://www.haque.co.uk/pachube.php [5] http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20110321,00.html [6] http://www.kickstarter.com/ [7] http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms [8] http://bergcloud.com/littleprinter/ [9] http://www.economist.com/node/15557443 [10] http://mashable.com/2010/03/17/youtube-24-hours/ [11] http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html [12] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pachube_acquired.php [13] http://dontflush.me/about [14] https://pachube.com/ [15] http://pubsub.io/about [16] http://blog.pachube.com/2011/03/real-time-radiation-monitoring-in-japan.html [17] https://joindiaspora.com/ [18] http://www.claros.org/web/action.do [19] http://openlayers.org/ [20] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1038658656/rdtnorg-radiation-detection-hardware-network-in-ja