Scanning my college alumni magazine,
I came across a piece by Judith Hertog called “A Monitored State.” Since it relates
closely to my earlier blog, Killer App,
I thought its report might be useful here as a gloss on that piece. “A Monitored State”
describes Dartmouth professor Andrew Campbell’s experiment monitoring student
behavior via the smartphones that virtually all carry and use constantly. A
paper he wrote described how smartphone sensor data “contain such detailed
information about a user’s behavior that researchers can predict the user’s GPA
(grade point average) or identify a user who suffers from depression or
anxiety.” In this study, called Student Life, 48 student volunteers allowed
Campbell’s team to gather a stream of data via an app installed on their
smartphones. The app “tracked and downloaded information from each phone’s
microphone, camera, light sensor, GPS, accelerometer and other sensors” and then
uploaded it to a database. By analyzing the data, Campbell’s researchers were
able to record details about each student’s location, study habits, parties
attended, exercise programs, and sleep patterns. For at least two students,
Campbell was even able to see signs of depression: “I could see they were not
interacting with other people, and one was not leaving his room at all,”
Campbell said. Both failed to show up for finals, whereupon Campbell gave them
incompletes and encouraged them to return in the fall to complete his and other
courses with success. What Campbell draws from this is that, in the future, not
only will universities be able to intervene to help students in such
situations, but such information will be available in real time to monitor everything, including the state
of every student’s mental well-being.
Campbell
has also collaborated with brain science colleagues “to discover how smartphone
sensor data can be combined with information from fMRI scans” in order to
eventually create apps that not only identify mental problems but also “intervene
before a breakdown occurs.” In fact, in a follow-up phase of his study, he got
student volunteers to submit to fMRI scans, and wear a Microsoft smart band
that collected body signals like heart rate, body temperature, sleep patterns,
and galvanic skin response—all associated with stress. Thus, more than simple
behaviors, today’s technologies can (and already do) detect, grossly at least,
an individual’s state of mind. One of Campbell’s colleagues predicts that in
addition to being able to predict which individuals are “most susceptible to
weight gain,” smartphones of the future will be able to warn when “its owner
enters a fast-food restaurant.”
The
potential threat from all these technologies has not been lost on Campbell and his
colleagues. His collaborator, Prof. Todd Heatherton, is already worried about a
future determined by the constant collection of the data monitored by
smartphones, and its use by companies, insurance underwriters, for instance, to
determine who gets insurance and how much they pay for it. Heatherton was also
shocked by how casual students were about sharing such personal data for his
study. But clearly, this generation is already used to sharing just about
everything on apps like Find Friends (an app that broadcasts one’s location to
everyone in one’s network). For Heatherton and others, this raises important
questions about the ethics of all this technology and how far it can be used to
monitor every detail of our lives. James Moore, a Dartmouth philosophy
professor specializing in ethics, worries how information about a person’s entire
life could be used by governments wanting, for just one example, to monitor
those on welfare. Or totalitarian governments that could use such data to keep
potentially rebellious populations under rigid control.
Campbell
himself worries about the same thing, hoping that legislation will be
forthcoming that will at least give individuals ownership of their own data
(now being used by Google and many others for commercial purposes and more).
People need to think about this, he says, and realize that “we are turning into
a monitored state.” Or perhaps already are.
Even
George Orwell couldn’t have imagined such an easily ‘big-brothered’ state—and all thanks
to those adorable smartphones.
Lawrence DiStasi
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