Technocreep (27 page)

In 2012, the
New York Times
described a controversial smartphones app called “Girls Around Me” (GAM) as “Taking Creepy to a New Level.”
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While it's not quite true that GAM demonstrates every aspect of technocreepiness, it does come pretty close.

GAM allowed a smartphone user to snoop on strangers in the vicinity who had checked into the location-based Foursquare service. On the surface, that seems totally reasonable. If someone discloses their location on Foursquare, presumably they would like to be found, at least by some people. However, GAM also silently links back to the Facebook profiles of the subjects, which often contain a great deal of personal information.

So, the scenario goes, Bob, possibly encouraged by the real-time gender ratio in a bar presented on another app, such as SceneTap, sits down on a stool and orders a beer. He stealthily checks out all the women in the bar (this was gender specific, but other apps like Gays Around Me soon followed) and chooses Alice as an attractive possible companion.

Her Facebook profile, which she has not kept sufficiently private, discloses that she is not in a relationship; likes Italian cooking; and that her favorite band is The Barenaked Ladies. Her photos reveal even more details about her likes and dislikes. Armed with this conversation fodder, and with Alice totally unaware, Bob goes over for a chat …

Let's run GAM against the Dimensions of Creepiness to see how it stacks up.

1. Known vs. Mysterious. Since a person may not even know of the existence of GAM, let alone that people around them are using it while pecking at their smartphones, the odds are good that this falls into the mysterious category. Also, in 2012 at least, few people had done much thinking about how different technology platforms, in this case Facebook, Foursquare, and even Google Maps, could be melded together.

2. Random vs. Certain. It is merely the luck of the draw that Bob and Alice are in the same place tonight. Whether this technology will even affect them depends on many factors, engendering an aspect of randomness here. Humans are, by and large, creatures of habit who find random incursions into their lives
somewhat uncanny.

3. High vs. Low Control. This is an interesting one. If Alice is a high tech wizard or a privacy expert, she may well be able to control her presence well enough to be in control of the situation. However, for most people in most bars on most nights, the likelihood is that there is a definite imbalance of power in favor of Bob, especially since he is initiating the use of the technology.

4. High vs. Low Impact. Another situational call. Even if Bob is so aroused that he approaches Alice and says something suggestive, she might just walk away or slap him. At the other extreme, swayed by his apparent clairvoyance, she might be persuaded to go home with him. That could end well or very badly. So we come back to the important factor of intention: is someone using GAM purely as a curiosity, as a tool to build up courage, or as a means to stalk a person?

5. Human vs. Mechanical. In his landmark essay On
the Psychology of the Uncanny,
German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch explained that “In storytelling, one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him in the case of a particular character.”
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While there was certainly human activity and input at the time of entering details on Facebook and checking in on Foursquare, that may be less true in the future. Automated data gathering along the lines of Zoominfo, combined with DeepFace-type facial recognition, may put the data in there on your behalf. Speaking at GigaOm Structure Data 2014 conference, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley indicated that automating check-ins is part of his company's future plans.
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There are some Mechanical aspects at work here too. Apps can sometimes post information automatically to your social media sites. And, of course, the very process of linking up Foursquare and Facebook through a common field like email address is a mechanical activity that has some creepy aspects of human-ness.

6. Good vs. Bad Reputation. Even the name “Girls Around Me” raised hairs on the necks of many people. After being pilloried in the press, the reputation of this app went downhill fast. Foursquare pulled the key data feed that it was using and GAM disappeared, though not before inspiring various copycats. By contrast, products with benign, even cute names like Facebook and Twitter appear to stand the test of time and work their way into our daily lives.

Some of GAM's successors may even be creepier. Jetpac City Guides sweep up photos posted on Instagram and “looks for faces in the photos, determines if they're happy or sad,” writes one reviewer.
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It also “makes style judgments (mustache? could be a hipster! lipstick? people get dressed up to visit here!).”

7. Surprise vs. Predictable. In the early days of any technology, its capabilities are often unknown and even startling to non-users. GAM undoubtedly took many people by surprise. Fortunately, it did not last long enough for people to view it is as a routine part of life in the bar scene. Other looming technologies, such as Google Glass and Oculus Rift may have enough staying power so that we will just look at Glassholes and Rifters and take them in our stride.

These Dimensions of Creepiness also provide insights into other technocreepy situations we've considered, and how the technocreepiness level can change based on various factors.

1. Known vs. Mysterious. Clearly revelations about government snooping programs fall in the mysterious category. We are told that, for reasons of national security, we are simply not allowed to know how we are being watched.

On the other hand, some technologies are only mysterious until you understand how they work. Disney's Inshin-Den-Shin communication system falls into this category. If you see people sending each other messages by touching ears with fingers, as happens in the ­demonstration video, it looks like magic. One you're shown how they do it, it is still impressive but no longer mysterious.

2. Random vs. Certain. When they first started randomly arriving, those “Nigerian 419” letters were novelties and many people fell for them. When they started filling up our mailboxes, and we knew we'd get some every day, they went from being creepy to simply being annoying. Eventually we will all understand that scammers use email; that a streetlamp may start talking to us at random; and that seemingly psychic coupon we just received on our smartphones is the result of walking past a particular trash can. There is some transfer of learning: once you recognize one kind of email fraud you are more likely to spot others. But it will be a never-ending process as the bad guys get sneakier and new technologies emerge.

3. High vs. Low Control. You could, perhaps, choose not to walk down a particular street in the City of London because the rubbish bins there are monitoring smartphone pings. But why should you have to? Should hidden technology force you to alter your real world behavior? Would you even know which rubbish bin is doing this? Based on the examples studied, it seems that technology control is often more illusory than real. You can decline on principle to give your Social Security Number on a credit card application. They will simply get it from a credit bureau or data broker. The work of the Dark Patterns researchers also shows that systems sometimes make it so hard to take control that we give up. They have even coined a phrase for making a website's privacy settings ultra-complex: “Privacy Zuckering.”

4. High vs. Low Impact. Potentially your health, wealth, and the most intimate details of your life are at risk here. Even little things like falsely telling a survey site that you have hemorrhoids just for the heck of it could, in theory, come back to bite you somehow in the future. We cannot possibly foresee all the impacts of the subterranean linkages between our technological contacts, so the best policy is to treat all personal information as sensitive, and put in a liberal dose of misinformation and even deliberately ­misleading “facts.”

5. Human vs. Mechanical. If there were (as was once the case in China) a building full of humans sorting through our Google searches to analyze them, that would be more disturbing than knowing it's done by bots. Then again, humans do have access, albeit in “anonymized” form, to the results of those bot searches and who knows what they are doing with that data. As we move into a world where human and machine intelligences merge and interact seamlessly, we will all be traveling into the Uncanny Valley. Whistleblower revelations have also shown us that data collected that is supposed to be mechanically analyzed can also come under human scrutiny. In the case of OPTIC NERVE, the GCHQ operation in the U.K. to intercept millions of Yahoo webcam images, it was reported that “The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff.”
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6. Good vs. Bad Reputation. If the “Boyfriend Tracker” folks had planned ahead, they could have named their app “Find My Phone That I Left in a Taxi” and it might not have been banned from the Google Play store. “Girls Around Me” suffered mightily from the sexist connotations of its name, whereas Facebook has a friendly feel to it. Technology creators and marketers need to do some deeper thinking about what they call their creations. Of course they shouldn't lie, but, as I noted in the MIT lab project, there's a world of difference between “Kinect of the Future” and “the Anne Frank Finder.”

7. Surprise vs. Predictable. A stranger calling you by name is surprising, but not if you happen to be wearing a nametag. Especially in its early days, people armed with apps like “Girls Around Me” had a secret weap­on that gave them an unfair advantage. The same will be true of Google Glass and whatever comes next. The antidote to surprise is usually education, though, to be fair, it's rather hard to educate yourself on the impact of government ­programs like PRISM, Optic Nerve, and XKeyscore on your personal life, and even the inner workings of software and algorithms elude most people.

Like a lawyer preparing a witness for cross-examination, it seems ­appropriate to consider some counterarguments against the major premise of this book—that our lives are infected with an increasing amount of technocreepiness.

Creepy technology can be beneficial.

It would be negligent to fail to acknowledge that even the most troubling technologies can sometimes be beneficial to us. People have been located in remote areas because technology was tracking them, even if they didn't know it. Car accident victims have survived because an OnStar operator somewhere dispatched emergency aid even if they didn't ask for it. The Ontario woman who was reunited with her lost $50M lottery ticket probably has no problems at all with video surveillance cameras in her favorite shopping haunts.

Indeed, General Keith Alexander in his Black Hat 2013 speech tried to argue that the daily lives and activities of Americans would be much less free and more restricted if the NSA was not doing what it does, as the government would have to use other measures to counteract the terrorist threat.

The fact that we derive ample benefits from so many technologies should not obscure the real dangers behind them. With the rare exception of institutions that collect no data about us, we are almost always giving up some part of ourselves when we interact with technology. If we have learned anything from the advance of computer science in the past five decades, it is that smart people will find ways to use information, often in ways that were never anticipated. Gurus from Raymond Kurzweil to the proponents of Watson at IBM assure us that the capability of machine intelligence is about to accelerate greatly.

Our lives are too fragmented for any system to put it all ­together and form a detailed and useful dossier on us.

Some people note that their digital photos are in their camera, or burned on a CD in a desk drawer; their professional lives are conducted under one email address, and personal business under another; and if they partake in dating sites like
Match.com
or use Christian Mingle, they create yet another identity, probably a pseudonym. Their Amazon purchases are separated from their banking details through Paypal, and they never give their credit cards online. They infer that this gives them some degree of immunity from the creepiest aspects of technology.

That may have been an accurate picture a decade ago. Today, our photos are more likely in cloud storage or on Facebook, and our friends are busy posting photos of us. As shown by Acquisti's work, as well as studies on medical privacy by Khaled El Emam at the University of Ottawa, supposedly anonymous photos and records can sometimes be manipulated to divulge information.
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If we learned anything from the Manning and Snowden disclosures, it is that information on us is continually being pulled together and shared without our knowledge or consent.

Some people believe that even if it is out there, extracting information about them would be like finding a specific needle in a haystack-sized pile of needles. However, this line of reasoning ignores the tremendous increase in computing power, the decrease in storage costs, and rapid improvement in data mining and analysis algorithms that have taken place over the past two decades. Another important factor is the development of keys to cross-reference us. The gold standard used to be a government-issued identity number such as a Social Security Number. Today, stores like Target are creating their own numbers for us; our email address allows us to be tied together on various sites; our browsers can be fingerprinted to uniquely identify our computers. Very significantly, the face is becoming a universal identifier and one that we cannot do a lot to change.

We are just not that interesting, or wealthy, or scary for ­anyone to care about us.