with a camera, accelerometer, and Blu-etooth stumbling everywhere you go.
Your phone could document your comings and goings, infer your activities
throughout the day, and record whom
you pass on the street or who engaged
you in conversation. Deployed by governments or compelled by employers,
four billion “little brothers” could be
watching you.
Whether phones engaged in sensing
data are tools for self and community
research, coercion, or surveillance depends on who collects the data, how it is
handled, and what privacy protections
users are given. As these new forms
of data begin to flow over phone networks, application developers will be
the first line of defense for protecting
the sensitive data collected by always-present, always-on mobile phones.
I should mention that I’m not one
of the developers on the front lines. I
work in science and technology studies (STS)—a social science interested
in the ways people, technologies, and
data interact and affect each other.a The
a See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_
and_technology_studies
developers I work with might say STS is
about telling them what they should be
doing, which I must admit, is the goal
of this article. I worry about the consequences of mobile phones as sensors,
and have a number of opinions about
what programmers, as well as social
scientists, might do to make this sort
of data collection work without slip-ping into coercion, surveillance, and
control.
Participatory sensing
Research that uses mobile phones to
collect data for personal or social proj-
