Smartphones for the blind and visually impaired

A truly worthwhile use of smartphones - "Disruptions: Visually Impaired Turn to Smartphones to See Their World" http://t.co/b4t8K0Ibx9
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) September 30, 2013

"Children Lost in War Zones and Disasters Find Their Families With an App"

A truly important app - "Children Lost in War Zones and Disasters Find Their Families With an App" | @nytimes http://t.co/i9heSczqFa
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) August 20, 2013

Book on ethical guidance for PICT on its way

Emerging Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies (PICT): Ethical Challenges, Opportunities and Safeguards 

Edited by Kenneth D. Pimple,  Ph.D.

To be published by Springer; expected publication date June 30, 2013.

Description

This book provides a wide and deep perspective on the ethical issues raised by pervasive information and communication technology (PICT) – small, powerful, and often inexpensive Internet-connected computing devices and systems. It describes complex and unfamiliar technologies and their implications, including the transformative potential of augmented reality, the power of location-linked information, and the uses of “big data,” and explains potential threats, including privacy invaded, security violated, and independence compromised, often through widespread and lucrative manipulation.

PICT is changing how we live, providing entertainment, useful tools, and life-saving systems. But the very smartphones that connect us to each other and to unlimited knowledge also provide a stream of data to systems that can be used for targeted advertising or police surveillance. Paradoxically, PICT expands our personal horizons while weaving a web that may ensnare whole communities.

Chapters describe particular cases of PICT gone wrong, but also highlight its general utility. Every chapter includes ethical analysis and guidance, both specific and general. Topics are as focused as the Stuxnet worm and as broad as the innumerable ways new technologies are transforming medical care.

Written for a broad audience and suitable for classes in emerging technologies, the book is an example of anticipatory ethics – “ethical analysis aimed at influencing the development of new technologies” (Deborah Johnson 2010).

The growth of PICT is outpacing the development of regulations and laws to protect individuals, organizations, and nations from unintended harm and malicious havoc. This book alerts users to some of the hazards of PICT; encourages designers, developers, and merchants of PICT to take seriously their ethical responsibilities – if only to “do no harm” – before their products go public; and introduces citizens and policy makers to challenges and opportunities that must not be ignored.

For more information

"Mobile location data 'present anonymity risk'"

"Scientists say it is remarkably easy to identify a mobile phone user from just a few pieces of location information."

It's "possible to identify a user from only 4 data points" - Mobile location data 'present anonymity risk' | BBS News bbc.in/101ySix
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) April 17, 2013

"Device Prevents Driving While Phone Is In Use"

Not good enough; hands-free is still too dangerous - Device Prevents Driving While Phone Is In Use | PSFK s.shr.lc/Zb1nry
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) March 19, 2013

"Will Google's Personal Assistant Be Creepy or Cool?"

This piece by Jenna Wortham (New York Times, June 28, 2012) asks an astute question.

I hadn't heard about Google Now before. It appears to be a kind of pocket butler that will come with the next version of Android. It will connect disparate information about your location, your calendar, and your preferences to give you advice on how to get through the day. Google has a Flash video that makes the thing easier to understand than any merely verbal explanation.

This e-butler (my coinage), according to Wortham, has the potential to "feel like a menacing stalker."

Google Now may also cause people to realize exactly how much data and information Google actually has about their routines and daily lives. And that might cause some people to be very, very uncomfortable, regardless of how useful the service is.

Wortham ends the essay with a particularly nicely written passage on the world of tomorrow (or five minutes from now):

We’re at the beginning of an era, the adolescence, of just beginning to understand what information we want to share and keep private, and when we don’t have a say in the matter. But we’re learning that our data exhaust, the small particulate matter that we deposit around the Web and world through our browsers and mobile devices, is becoming a very powerful tool in aggregate, and that large companies are hoping to use it to their advantage.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool"

A recent article published in the New York Times ("Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool" by Eric Lichtblau, March 31, 2012) reveals that local police forces - not just the FBI and CIA - are now using cellphone tracking as "a powerful and widely used surveillance tool ... with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight."

If that's not bad enough, some carriers are profiting at their customers' expense.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

The police, naturally, claim that the practice saves lives. "Law enforcement officials" contacted by the Times "said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits."

The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for instance, used a cell locator in February to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

I assume that the police are mostly tempted to use tools that they find helpful, which is good and proper. But to disregard the legality of such use - that's another matter.

The law in this area is not yet clear, so perhaps the police and the cellphone companies should be given the benefit of the doubt. But I, for one, am unwilling to do so until they convince me that warrants aren't necessary.

Special thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained "5,500 pages of internal records ... from 205 police departments nationwide" and provided them to the Times.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Privacy in your car, online, in your pocket, in your back yard

A cluster of articles in the New York Times highlight a number of technologies, practices, and laws that threaten our privacy. Taken in chronological order:

1. Private Snoops Find GPS Trail Legal to Follow by Erik Eckholm (January 28, 2012). The good news is that on January 23, 2012, "the Supreme Court held that under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle is a search," meaning that the police will have to get a warrant to do so. The bad news is that the a mere $300 can let you buy "a device no bigger than a cigarette pack, attach it to a car without the driver’s knowledge and watch the vehicle’s travels — and stops — at home on your laptop." You can easily keep track of your teenager, your spouse, your business rival, a potential victim. In some of these cases it would be legal, in others not; but it would be so easy to do and so hard to get caught. (See also Privacy, Technology and Law by Barry Friedman (January 28, 2012) for more on recent Supreme Court decisions.)
   
   
2. Should Personal Data Be Personal? by Somini Sengupta (February 4, 2012). Whether it should be, it isn't; rather it's a commodity so valuable that "In the United States alone, companies spend up to $2 billion a year to collect" data we routinely share on the Internet. Differing cultural attitudes toward privacy - splitting Europe and the U.S., for example - make it difficult or impossible to regulate the ways that international enterprises can collect and use personal data online.
   
   
3. Mobile Apps Take Data Without Permission by Nicole Perlroth and Nick Bilton (February 15, 2012). "Companies that make many of the most popular smartphone apps for Apple and Android devices — Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram among them - routinely gather the information in personal address books on the phone and in some cases store it on their own computers." That we now know about this is a step forward.
   
   
4. Drones Set Sights on U.S. Skies by Nick Wingfield and Somini Sengupta (February 17, 2012). But in a step backward, a new Federal law requires the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to allow commercial use of drones - small, remote controlled, inexpensive aerial surveillance devices.

   “As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. “I don’t think this doctrine makes sense, and I think the widespread availability of drones will drive home why to lawmakers, courts and the public.”

It's a brave new world out there. Or will be soon.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"What Fueled Twitter’s Success?"

How did Twitter become so popular? The simple answer is that nothing succeeds like success - the same reason we still have the QWERTY keyboard.

A more sophisticated answer can be found in this article by Paul Hyman (ACM News, January 12, 2012), which is a report on a technical article (Modeling the adoption of innovations in the presence of geographic and media influences by Jameson L. Toole, Meeyoung Cha, and Marta C. González), but from me you're going to get a very minimal, two-part explanation.

1. Lots of people who lived near each other adopted Twitter early on. The service became available in late March of 2006, and by early August of 2009 "nearly 3.5 million people signed up for Twitter, mainly in cities with high concentrations of young, tech-savvy early adopters like San Francisco and Boston."
2. Celebrity praise of Twitter - Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey are mentioned - also boosted the number of users dramatically.

Together, these two forces pushed Twitter users to "a tipping point of 13.5% of the population." And the rest is history.

So if you want your product to "go viral," release it first in locations with lots of likely early adopters and induce celebrities to plug it. It would probably help to use Twitter or Facebook.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Using Google’s Data to Sell Thermometers to Mothers"

I have been known to rant about advertising, which is intended to induce people to buy products they would not otherwise buy. In other words, advertising strives to manipulate behavior; it is (or wants to be) a kind of mind control. Perfect advertising would be perfect mind control. For this reason I deplore any advances in the art or science of advertising.

We learn in this New York Times article (Andrew Adam Newman, Dec. 22, 2011) of an advertising campaign for children's thermometers. The ads appear in "popular apps like Pandora," but only on devices used by mothers who live in areas experiencing a high rate of flu and who live "within two miles of retailers that carry the thermometer."

"Flu levels in your area are high," says the banner ad within an app. "Be prepared with [product name]."

This breakthrough in advertising is made possible by Google Flu Trends, a predictive model for flu outbreaks using Google's massive database of Internet searches. The model has "a reporting lag of only about a day, outdoing C.D.C. flu reports, which typically are published a week or two after breakouts."

Arguably, the thermometer advertisers are performing a public service. I know from experience that it can be hard to take the temperature of a baby or toddler, and easier methods are welcome. It's also important to know whether your child has a fever and, if so, how severe it is. Getting the word out could be useful to mothers and even life-saving for children.

So I don't really object to this campaign. But I do deplore the advance in mind control.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"One Million Apps, and Counting"

From "One Million Apps, and Counting" by Shelly Freierman (New York Times, December 11, 2011):

The pace of new app development dwarfs the release of other kinds of media. “Every week about 100 movies get released worldwide, along with about 250 books,” said Anindya Datta, the founder and chairman of Mobilewalla which helps users navigate the mobile app market. “That compares to the release of around 15,000 apps per week.”

That's a lot of apps. If 0.1% of them were defective in a way that would compromise a user's privacy or security, that would be just 15 dangerous apps per week, or about 1,000 so far. Good odds, or bad?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Secret memo reveals which telecoms store your data the longest"

Francis Harvey, to whom my thanks, brought this item to my attention. In an article by David Kravets of wired.com describes "a newly released Justice Department internal memo that for the first time reveals the data retention policies of America’s largest telecoms." The article includes a link to the one-page memo. Apparently AT&T has the biggest appetite for keeping track of its user's movements:

The biggest difference in retention surrounds so-called cell-site data. That is information detailing a phone’s movement history via its connections to mobile phone towers while it's traveling.

Verizon keeps that data on a one-year rolling basis; T-Mobile for “a year or more;” Sprint up to two years, and AT&T indefinitely, from July 2008.

Also of interest: Verizon keeps "text message content" for 3-5 days, but T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint don't keep it at all.

This information could be useful to policy makers, as the article recognizes.

The document release comes two months before the Supreme Court hears a case testing the government’s argument that it may use GPS devices to monitor a suspect’s every movement without a warrant. And the disclosure comes a month ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Electronic Privacy Communications Act, an outdated law that the government has invoked to obtain, without a warrant, the data the Justice Department document describes.

Stay tuned for future developments.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

The ubiquity of surveillance

Arlo and Janis, one of my favorite newspaper comic strips, featured a PAIT-related subject yesterday. The strip is subtle and funny, and the subject is scary or annoying, depending on your point of view. To me it's both. Read the strip and let me know what you think (use the comment feature below).

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

More on personalization; loving our devices; censor-proof Internet

Three interesting articles, two that have languished for weeks awaiting my attention, and one more recent.

• The Trouble With the Echo Chamber Online by Natasha Singer (New York Times, May 28, 2011) draws on Eli Pariser's recent book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You (see my earlier post) and an interview with Pariser, among other sources, to explore the downside of personalized Web searches and other online experiences: Increasing isolation.

• Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts. (New York Times, May 28, 2011) is an op-ed piece by John Franzen and drawn from his May 21 commencement address at Kenyon College, in which Franzen contrasts "the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love." It's a better than average commencement address, but, to my taste, the profundity mandate implicit in the genre gives the talk a sophomoric tone.

• U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors by James Glanz and John Markoff (New York Times, June 12, 2011) describes a "global effort" to develop technologies that will be able to do an end-run around Internet censorship, such as an Internet server that can fit in a suitcase. The goal is to empower groups struggling against "repressive governments."
  
  It's one of those ideas that give me a momentary thrill followed by a longer-lasting chill. I'm all for providing non-violent support to dissident groups, but it seems likely that these technologies could also be used for nefarious purposes. Once a technology is deployed, it will be imitated and re-deployed, and not necessarily for democracy-loving purposes. Would it be a boon for terrorists? For rogue governments?
  
  The only answer I have is that if the U.S. can develop these technologies with good intentions, others with bad intentions could develop them, too. Perhaps it's best to be ahead of the curve.
  

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Now, to Find a Parking Spot, Drivers Look on Their Phones"

Those lucky people in San Francisco now have an iPhone app to help them find empty parking spaces, according to the New York Times (May 7, 2011, by Matt Richtel). This could be a good thing; it will probably reduce stress and frustration (and perhaps road rage) and alleviate downtown congestion, some 30% of which is estimated by city officials to be caused by drivers looking for a place to park.

The city installed sensors in nearly 20,000 parking spaces that alert a computer system when those spots are filled (or emptied) as part of a $20 million parking initiative. (Unless the initiative covered other projects, that's $1,000 per parking spot.)

As the article notes, San Francisco isn't the first city to try this out, but it is the most widespread (so far). Can anyone doubt that it will lead to more distracted drivers and more collisions - including automobile/pedestrian collisions?

When Google perfects its self-driving cars and hooks in this system, San Francisco will be driving paradise.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Attention Turns to the Dangers of Distracted Pedestrians"

Fresh on the heals of news that T-Mobile and other mobile phone carriers are serious about providing protection against distracted driving (see my earlier post), the New York Times (January 25, 2011) reports that several states - New York, Oregon, Virginia, California, and Arkansas are named - have passed, tried to pass, or are thinking of passing laws to ban pedestrians and bicyclists from using mobile phones and media players with headphones or ear buds.

A surprising number of people walk or run right in front of a moving car when entranced by their music, often with fatal consequences. The curmudgeon in me just wants to nominate such people for the Darwin Award, but death is an awfully steep penalty for a moment's distraction, and the innocent drivers involved in such collisions must be seriously traumatized.

Before legislation started popping up banning texting while driving, I wondered whether it would be possible or effective simply to define distracted driving as reckless driving. That legal move, plus a good deal of public education, might be a good deterrent. There's probably an analog for bicyclists, but is there for pedestrians?

At any rate, no matter how much we love our devices, and how much actual value they add to our lives, we really shouldn't let them eradicate our good sense.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Cell Carriers Explore Ways to Limit Distracted Driving"

This article in the January 20, 2011, New York Times, describes the announcement by T-Mobile of a service that "for $4.99 a month, automatically disables rings and alerts and sends calls to voice mail when the phone is in a moving car." The feature can be disabled by passengers or foolhardy drivers. Other carriers are exploring the same idea.

I think that using a mobile phone while driving - whether texting or talking, hands-free or hands-on - should be illegal. Distracted driving is dangerous. But until we pass laws or change our culture, this kind of feature is welcome.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director