The Naked Future (4 page)

In the summer of 2007 Gordon Jones was living in Charleston, South Carolina. A fire broke out at a nearby furniture store, killing nine firefighters, the largest number of firemen to die on duty since the 9/11 terrorist attack. An enormous memorial followed. Emergency workers from around the country came out to Charleston as the facts of the incident were reported on the news in rounds, like a funerary dirge. The public safety workers succeeded in pulling out several survivors from the blaze before the roof caved in on them.

Jones was working at the time for Global Emergency Resources (GER), a company that markets a software tool for monitoring ambulances and hospitals during emergencies. Watching the local coverage of the memorial service for the firefighters, he realized that the technology he was developing could have saved lives: “I said to myself,
What if somebody, one of the people trapped inside the store, had a smartphone to broadcast what the scene looked like?
That might have made a difference.”

It sounded like a worthwhile and potentially profitable start-up. Jones founded a company and shortly after announced the launch of the Guardian Watch app. Guardian Watch enables anyone with a cell phone to live-stream video and pictures of an event directly to emergency personnel. This may not sound that significant but think of an alarm system as nothing more than an information distribution network. Some alarm systems are better than others. Guardian Watch enables thousands of people to provide streaming visual data about a situation at an information transfer rate of hundreds of thousands of bytes per second, the average upload speed of a 4G or higher phone. Guardian Watch was the first iPhone app to take advantage of the smartphone's full capabilities to give emergency workers a visual and auditory sense of what may be ahead of them.

“A picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a thousand pictures,” says Jones. This statement, though perhaps a bit corny, encapsulates why Guardian Watch really is a clear improvement over traditional emergency response systems. It delivers information that's user-specific, varies depending on context, and moves at a speed and scale that make sense for emergencies—namely more and faster.

A decade ago, increasing the scale of information collection and distribution to the point where it would have made a difference to one of those Charleston firefighters would have been a daunting technological challenge. Today, the tools, platform, and infrastructure already exist and have been widely distributed. You're carrying all of this around in your pocket.

The single biggest driver of the Internet of Things is the smartphone, that always-on, GPS-enabled sensor that more than 64 percent of the U.S. population carries around with them. We know that smartphones today make it easier to find restaurants, share experiences as they occur, shop, and study. Mobile technology makes data creation and curation possible anywhere, which means we're creating and curating much more of that data more of the time.

Guardian Watch already faces competition from other groups looking to leverage the information gathering and broadcasting technology of smartphones. A Silicon Valley–based start-up called CiviGuard takes the idea a step further. The platform integrates streams from Twitter, Facebook, and local emergency channels and presents the user with a “networked window” of an emergency situation playing out in real time. It gives geo-tagged advice that's specific to an individual user based on a variety of variables, the most important of which is location. What that means is this: depending on the situation, a user may be told to stay where she is while a different user may be told stay away from that area. Most important, CiviGuard includes a scenario function to allow users to conduct virtual emergency simulations.

Imagine you're in Manhattan and there's just been a terrorist
attack. Want to know which streets are most likely to become blocked when the news spreads? How your company's supply chain will be disrupted? Where to find food and water while they're still available on store shelves? CiviGuard will tell you and will do so based on a rapidly updating understanding of what's going on around the city. And should CiviGuard not pan out, the Environmental Systems Resources Institute (Esri) can also build you a custom geographic information system that does all of the above, and can integrate it with population density, water tables, jurisdiction, and hundreds of other maps.

The same real-time broadcasting capability that will allow me to better navigate my way out of a disaster can be used for other purposes as well. The mapping of human behavior promises enormous benefits, but it also speaks to a future where invisibility and anonymity are no longer the default setting for life.

The Internet of Things is also the intersection camera that snaps a picture of my license when I try to beat the yellow light. It's the smart electricity meter that California's Pacific Gas and Electric Company now insists its customers use, allowing the utility to optimize energy delivery but also to better track individual energy use. If you're a PG&E customer, the Internet of Things is the reason why your energy company can infer when you're home and when you're not based on when and how you use certain devices.
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In our rush to overlay data collection devices across the physical environment, we overlooked the fact that the same devices we use to perceive our environment can just as easily be turned on us.

We will be seen. We will be tagged. It's happening.

Want to know how many people with smartphones are in terminal 4 of New York's JFK Airport, standing on line to get tickets to
The Daily Show
, browsing the shoe store down the street? A company called Navizon sells a device that can track every phone using Wi-Fi within a given area. Just plug this device into a nearby wall
outlet to monitor that action in real time. Because we know that more than 60 percent of the U.S. population now owns a smartphone, a couple of months' worth of data will tell you how many people are likely to be in any area that you're surveilling on any given day and time of the week. Leave the device plugged in for a few decades and you'll have a
reasonable
estimate for how many people will be at a specific place, at a specific time, on a specific day of the year. This is the sort of information that big phone companies like Verizon and AT&T have at their fingertips. When you walk around with your cell phone on, you give these companies data about your location. AT&T and Verizon then strip that data of identifying information and sell it to city planners, commercial interests, and others. Verizon even claims the ability to build a demographic profile of people gathered together in a specific place for a specific thing, such as in a stadium for a rock concert or a sporting event.
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Navizon puts the same sort of capability in the hands of individuals with small budgets but larger time horizons. Navizon CEO and founder Cyril Houri is marketing the device as a way for entrepreneurs to do location planning. There are some limitations. Because the device measures Wi-Fi from smartphones, it's also biased toward younger adults (18–25) who are—not surprisingly—more likely to own a smartphone than are people over age sixty-five. High-income earners also show up more often than low-income earners. But the current profile of smartphone users is not the
future
profile.

Navizon's analytics system won't disclose the names of specific people whom the device picks (unless those people opt in to the Navizon buddy network) but the system can recognize individual phones. It has to, in order to count them. If someone follows roughly the same pattern every day, hitting work, the store (or the bar), then home in the same time window, the difference between tagging the phone and tagging the person effectively disappears. MIT researchers Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, and Vincent Blondel from the Université catholique de Louvain took a big data set of anonymized GPS and
cell phone records for 1.5 million people, the sort of stripped-down location data that Verizon and AT&T sell to corporate partners to figure out the types of people who can be found at specific locations at particular times of day. The data consisted of records of particular phones checking in with particular cell antennas. What the researchers found was that for 95 percent of the subjects, just four location data points were enough to link the mobile data to a unique person.
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A growing percentage of smartphone users voluntarily surrender data about themselves wherever they use geo-social apps. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all have “check in” features that broadcast your location to people in your network. Other, more creative services will facilitate specific interactions based on what you're looking to do wherever you happen to be.

An app called Sonar will identify the VIPs in the room; Banjo will tell you the names of nearby Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram users; a service called Grindr, launched back in 2009, will pinpoint the location of the nearest gay man who may be interested in a relationship—of either the long- or short-term variety.

To the smartphone-suspicious, these services seem to be more trouble than they're worth. What's the value of knowing the Twitter handle of the person at the next table in a restaurant, when, at best, such an app just detracts from the authentic experience of real life? At worst, it's giving away personal info to strangers.

However, to a growing number of smartphone owners, check-ins and geo-social Web apps like Foursquare are an integral aspect of smartphone ownership. More than 18 percent of smartphone owners use some sort of geo-social service (as of February 2012), a number up 33 percent in one year, with heaviest use concentrated among the young. Importantly, more than 70 percent of smartphone owners use
some
sort of location-based service on the phone, even if it is just the GPS.
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These apps change the way users perceive and interact with their environment as well as the way actors in that environment interact with them. Geo-social apps work to raise the net awareness level in
any neighborhood or room. Today, most of this added social intelligence is of limited value at best. But the situation is evolving rapidly.

The rising popularity of these apps, which is closely connected to smartphone adoption in general, promises a big change in our expectations of privacy. There's inevitability to this. As more people buy smartphones, more people use them the way the devices were designed to be used, with geo-social and location-aware apps. Wearable computing, if it eventually replaces what we know today as cell phones, will further enable this trend. We want to know more about the environment we're in, what people on Yelp, contributors on Wikipedia, and friends on Facebook have to say about the place where we've arrived. This is what futurist Jamais Cascio calls augmented reality, and what the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) calls situational awareness. It's also human nature. As our friends, neighbors, nieces, nephews, sons, and daughters submit to the impulse to download an app that uses location information, the opt-out strategy becomes less effective for the rest of us, even those of us who consider ourselves extremely privacy aware.

We leak data through our friends.

One of the better-known examples of the accidental surrender of personal information via smartphone—what hacker, author, and astrophysicist Alasdair Allan has dubbed data leakage—involves an app called Path, which was billed as a smarter, leaner, more mobile-friendly answer to Facebook. Started by Facebook alum Dave Morin, the service was launched as a way for users to digitally document comings and goings in the world. This was your path. The service worked a lot like Facebook except that users were limited to 150 friends, based on the theory that 150 is the maximum amount of useful acquaintances that a person is capable of maintaining. These people would receive the premium subscription to your ongoing life story. Path received angel-investor funding from the likes of Ashton Kutcher and after tweaking the service a bit, it went from 10,000 users to 300,000 in less than a month.
^14
,
15
The service today has more than 10 million users.

Path was a hit because it seemed to provide the sort of intimate,
authentic, and secure sharing experience that Facebook couldn't offer once users had to have different privacy settings for bosses, English teachers, mothers-in-law, et cetera. The sharing and posting on Path felt intuitive. Turns out it was a bit too intuitive.

Before long, a Singapore-based developer named Arun Thampi discovered that the ease of interfacing came at a high cost. Thampi was playing around with the code when he discovered something unusual. “It all started innocently enough,” he wrote on his blog. “I was thinking of implementing a Path Mac OS X app as part of our regularly scheduled hackathon . . . I started to observe the various API calls made to Path's servers from the iPhone app . . . I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/add. Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don't remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new ‘Path' and repeated the experiment and I got the same result—my address book was in Path's hands.”
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The company was holding detailed information on the friends, families, coworkers, and contacts for all three hundred thousand or so of its users, a list that potentially included tens of millions of people. They quickly issued an apology and a software update. But, in many ways, the damage was already done.

Allan has called this the inevitable result of the increasing market for mobile software among people who don't understand—and have no desire to learn—how their most cherished devices work. We want our apps to know us, to present customized answers to our problems and questions, but we don't care how they arrive at those solutions until there's a problem.