Technology review- Reality Mining

Here are a couple of exerpts from a Technology review article called Reality Mining.

Every time you use your cell phone, you leave behind a few bits of information. The phone pings the nearest cell-phone towers, revealing its location. Your service provider records the duration of your call and the number dialed.

Some people are nervous about trailing digital bread crumbs behind them. Sandy ­Pentland, however, revels in it. In fact, the MIT professor of media arts and sciences would like to see phones collect even more information about their users, recording everything from their physical activity to their conversational cadences.

Taking advantage of other sensors in cell phones, such as the microphone or the accelerometers built into newer devices like Apple’s iPhone, could even extend the benefits of reality mining into personal health care, Pentland says. For example, clues to diagnosing depression could be found in the way a person talks: depressed people may speak more slowly, a change that speech analysis software on a phone might recognize more readily than friends or ­family do. Monitoring a phone’s motion sensors might reveal slight changes in gait, which could be an early indicator of ailments such as Parkinson’s disease.

While the promise of ­reality mining is great, the idea of collecting so much personal information naturally raises many questions about privacy, Pentland admits. He says it’s crucial that behavior-logging technology not be forced on anyone. But legal statutes are lagging behind our data collection abilities, he says, which makes it all the more important to begin discussing how the technology will be used.

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