Smart Shift

When Roger Ebert, long-time film critic for the Chicago Sun Times, died in 2013, his¹ Twitter account was quickly taken over by his wife Chaz and his colleague Jim Emerson, both of whom he had asked to contribute to the feed. “Last week R asked me to tweet new stuff on re.com. Never dreamed it would be memorials,” Jim wrote. Both Chaz and Jim contributed eulogies to his blog, and his wife updated his Facebook page, as was right and fitting. And so, Roger Ebert’s legacy lived on, his well-loved turns of phrase and thoughtful comments maintained for eternity.

We see similar stories across the social web. You don’t have to be famous to have a virtual presence maintained when you die, as partners, family members and colleagues adapt our better-known digital presences – our blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages into memories. Memorial sites also exist, though the challenge, in the fast-moving world of technology, is assuring a such a service will still be there when it is needed – four of the seven services listed here a few years years ago no longer exist. Who knows what even the mainstream social sites will have become in a few years’ time, when our fickle race turns its attention to the next Big Thing?

Maybe, in this barely started business we call the technology revolution, some bright spark will come up with a way to bring together the different strands that we created in life, enabling e-commerce vendors to mark accounts as ‘deceased’ and take them offline, even as they archive and clear away the detritus of our digital lives. Or perhaps (as some have speculated) we will reach a stage where our personalities live on, beyond our physical deaths. This is still the stuff of science fiction. Or equally, our online identities might be mere vapour trails of human existence, our carefully composed thoughts destined to languish as background noise in the ever-increasing information mountains we create. So what if, in the future, we can still catch a glimpse of the day-to-day doings of friends and heroes, snapped in that moment just before we logged off for the last time, our unfinished email conversations and online scrabble games held in eternal limbo?

At the present moment, the only real answer is to create a presence in life that we would be happy to have in death. Because, for now, the information we create online is not going anywhere, fast or slow. As we have already seen, in this brave new world, no information ever gets destroyed. If only it was just our social presences — as we have seen, inordinate quantities of data are being accumulated about out movements, our web site clicks, our purchasing habits and entertainment interests. All that information, all those “if you liked this, you might like…” algorithms, all those connected devices have thus far been disconnected, operating in their own spheres. Algorithmically, however, the tendency is to connect, to integrate, to use the output of one system to drive another. The fact that our governments have been benefiting from this simple fact, collecting data on just about everything they can is, in hindsight, as inevitable as Facebook or Google's trawling of our messages for details of personal interests they could sell to advertisers.

As, indeed, is the fact that the authorities have proved themselves completely incapable of stemming the outflow of information as to what they have been gathering. Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, Anonymous and the unnamed leakers of the Panama papers were not mega-minds holding the world's data mountains hostage, but folks who, for whatever reason, decided to flick the software equivalent of a switch and who have gained notoriety as a result. Some see them as pariahs, others as freedom fighters but the consequence is the same: increased transparency as, once information has been released into the open, it cannot be hidden again. Such characters are not alone: a broad range of people, from corporate leaders to the NSA analysts who have spied on ex-partners, have been pushing at the boundaries of both equality and common decency as they discover what they can do with such a wealth of information.

Some commentators have been shaking their virtual heads in disbelief at the lack of public response — testament to the pervading sense of passivity even as new opportunities to breach privacy continue to emerge, with ethical consequences that go far beyond the questions of legality — such as the case of direct mail targeting the recently bereaved, or the now-banned ’smart’ bins² which track people using their Bluetooth identifiers. Beacons — the technologies behind the bins — are being trialled in just about every store, to an intrusive yet innocuous end, to enable offers to be delivered to individuals as they move through the store as a physical repeat of the “if you liked this, you might like…” algorithm. The data they collect could go so much further, however, as it adds to the pile of drive-by data being accumulating about ourselves.

In September 2015 GE Software launched a new initiative. GE, that grand survivor of the industrial revolution, believes that its future lies not in power plants and lightbulbs,but in the software that surrounds them. Extending the sensor-laden models espoused by the Internet of Things, GE announced that it wanted to be a market leader in what it called ‘digital twins’ — that is, virtual representations of physical objects that could be viewed, modelled and even repaired without manual intervention. “The ultimate vision for the digital twin is to create, test and build our equipment in a virtual environment,” explained³ John Vickers, manager of NASA’s National Center for Advanced Manufacturing and an early adopter of the digital twins idea. “Only when we get it to where it performs to our requirements do we physically manufacture it. We then want that physical build to tie back to its digital twin through sensors so that the digital twin contains all the information that we could have by inspecting the physical build.”

GE’s goal is to build an open database of digital representations of objects that can be accessed and updated from anywhere, by anyone. It’s a laudable objective, but why stop with physical objects? Why not animals, or indeed people? We all have a virtual twin, in principle. Some technological circles, not least gaming, already accept the notion of a virtual representation of something our person — an avatar, for example, which can then be customised to suit the in-game environment. Outside of this world, our current virtual representations are fragmented and of poor quality, but already data brokerage corporations such as Axciom are looking to change that. Hackneyed phrases like, “If the service is free, you are the product”, bandied around as if saying them often enough makes them acceptable, reflect how corporations already ‘get’ the notion of the virtual, exploitable self.

Put the notions together and it doesn’t take much to realise we are creating a transparent, accessible virtual world which reflects, and in many cases augments the physical world, with the former making connections and drawing conclusions that would be impossible in the latter. We are a long way from achieving such a goal, which is both a blessing and a curse as it leads to partial interpretations based on available data. It is not enough to know that I was moving at 100 miles per hour, having consumed 5 units of alcohol, if indeed I was on a train rather than in a car, for example. There’s also the question of data quality: much of the data that exists today is known to be incomplete or inaccurate, as the numbers of cases of mistaken identity in areas including healthcare and credit checking serve to show. Identity quality has become crucial, not only for humans but for the drugs they take, or the plants⁴ they handle. Failure could, and indeed can already result in miscarriages of justice, insurance premium problems or any number of other issues. Of course, the assumption here is that quality is due to human error — but it could just as easily be down to deliberate data corruption. You don’t have to be a master hacker to send a fraudulent email that looks like it has come from someone else, for example.

In the virtual representation of the world, we also need to consider our digital shadows. The European Data Protection act does provide for cases with legally negative ramifications (which make sense, it’s a legal document) but it doesn’t take into account situations operating within existing laws which nonetheless erode personal rights or potentially lead to social exclusion. A seemingly innocuous data set might be quite revelatory — we know that soil data can be used as an indicator of vine disease, for example. But what if it revealed the farmer’s smoking habits?

A little extra contextual information is vital. As the number of sensors around us flourish, they should be fingerprinting their own data so that it can be traced to the source. As a consequence data needs to know its own provenance and if it cannot, it should potentially be discarded. This drives the need for traceability — a clear indication (for example using an encryption-based mechanism) that data was generated when and how it was stated to be. At the moment there is no easy way to know who has access to what, from where. For example banking details being given to credit agencies, marketing information being shared to Experian. Or to the government. It might not be untoward to suggest that data without certifiable, non-repudiatable provenance could be considered inadmissible as evidence. This also requires transparency — breach of privacy should not happen through obscurity. And if information has been sold on, we should be able to know about it. It should be possible to monitor how we are being monitored. This needs better metadata than we have today, which could be considered the missing 8th principle of Privacy By Design, which implies that designers can’t be held responsible for subsequent use of data. Such rules sets also need to consider IoT privacy⁵, therefore.

The debate on such topics is understandably broad and complex, after all, we are talking about the whole world. At the same time however, it remains fledgling in the context of big data. In education, it can appear across other topics, from law to computer science, security to economics. Yes, it should be taught in all, but the consequence is that it is being given an incomplete treatment. “The only helpful general conclusion is that you don’t have to call a module ‘Information Ethics’ for that to be its core content, and information ethics is also present in small but significant ways across the curriculum,” says⁶ Paul Sturges of the The Australian Library and Information Association. “The interesting question that this raises is ‘Sub to what?’ Clearly it is sub to Information Science, but since Computer Science, Media Studies and the other disciplines mentioned here do not particularly recognise themselves as partial incarnations of Information Science, that isn’t a completely helpful answer.”

In the meantime, we all know that our very real lives are being intruded upon — we can feel it in our bones. Just as we would find it unacceptable to be body-searched for no reason, or for a telephone engineer to walk into our front rooms and start flicking through our address books, so are we experiencing the discomfort of having our online lives mined for information, or being ‘followed’ by over-zealous and poorly targeted banner advertising. To dislike feelings of intrusion is the most natural thing in the physical world, and so it is also in the virtual world. Even more frustrating is that much of the problem is of our own making. We need to accept that we are all complicit – by allowing our information to be shared, collected and used, we invite the devil over our doorsteps. The inevitable consequence of having such vast quantities of data is the death, not of privacy, but of obscurity both in terms of our past actions and, more fundamentally, our future behaviours.

Information is indifferent meanwhile, even oblivious to our attempts to control it as an entity, a fact that the darker elements of our governments and corporations are exploiting, even as they profess the opposite. As are we all, potentially, as we watch Blackberry Messenger become the anti-establishment rioter's preferred mode of communication, or participate en masse in click-rallies aimed at influencing corporations and governments, or benefit from Freedom of Information requests. Indeed, ex-UK prime minister Tony Blair sees the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act as one of his biggest regrets. “You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it,” he said⁷ of the decision.

But, as many have said, information wants to be free. It is therefore up to all of us, the people who will ultimately be impacted by what we are creating – to consider the moral and ethical questions around it. Is there an answer? Yes there is, by no longer thinking about information as a separate element of our existence, but as an immutable part of us. Like it or not we are indeed heading towards a shadow-less virtual twin of our world, as algorithms shine a light onto every nook and cranny of our existence. This doesn’t require all computers to be ultra-smart; more simply, it becomes easier and easier to interpolate and triangulate between data sources to work out what is going on. If you were at point A, then at point C, and the only way to get there was via point B… well, you get the picture.

Against this background of ultra-transparency and absolute knowledge, we have not yet fully grasped that information about ourselves doesn't just belong to us — data is us, not just ‘to all intents and purposes’ but at a very deep level. We need to incorporate into our collective psyches, the notion that information and we are the same thing. Data about us should be treated in exactly the same way as ourselves; whatever is right for the physical, should also be considered for the virtual, and our virtual, digital, quantified selves should be afforded the same rights as our physical selves. Until we get this, and national and international legislation reflects the principle across the board, we shall continue to be beaten down by the feeling that, in information terms, we are giving away more than we are getting. As we add layer upon layer of detail to everything we see and do, the level of discomfort will only increase until such time as we, as a race, reclaim our information-augmented humanity.

With such a data-enabled understanding in place, the next hurdle is to reconsider how we engage with each other.