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-