ARTICLES MODERN

Mr.Harrison Brown, a 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at MIT, did not need to make complex calculations to find out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers follow their every move, he receives a free smartphone .
Now, when he formed another student, researchers know. When you send an e-mail or text message, too, they know. When listening to music, they know the song. Each moment has its Windows Mobile Smartphone with him, they know where he is and who is nearby.
Mr. Brown and the other approximately 100 students who live in the hall at MIT cleanup have agreed to swap their privacy smartphones that generate digital beamed routes to be a central computer. Beyond the individual devices capture a picture in motion a dorm of social networks.
Students data, but a balloon in a vast sea of digital information is recorded by a thick web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to labels from ID badges office, which capture our movement and interactions. Together with the information already gathered from sources such as surfing the Web and credit cards in the database is emerging field called for a collective intelligence.

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet to balance incursion in every corner of life and cranny, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, to improve the effectiveness of advertising for community groups to provide new ways of organizing.

But even practitioners agree that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on the level of Big Brother could only dream of.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to identify the secret of people suffering from certain diseases and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, government or law enforcement could identify members of a group of protest tracking social networks out of new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology - from marketing to fighting the war - they could not imagine that not only pervading our lives in the next few years,” said Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for a company Investment in New York.

Read widely in a Web posting, he claimed that there were significant opportunities that could be misused, “This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years, it may also be one of the most pernicious. ”

In the past 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of individual computer age. But new technologies have become so powerful individual privacy protection that can not be the only problem. Now, with Internet, wireless sensors, and the ability to analyze a flood of data, a person profile can be made without him or her to monitor directly.

“Some have argued that with new technology there is a diminished expectation of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a group of privacy rights in Washington. “But the opposite may also be true. New techniques may require us to expand our understanding of privacy and to address the impact that data collection on groups of people and not just one person. ”

Mr. Brown, for one, is not concerned about losing his privacy. MIT researchers have convinced him that they had gone to great lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that would reveal his identity.

In addition, he says, “the way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we all have e-mail and Web sites and blogs.”

“This is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy,” he added.

Google and its vast holding of more than a million servers spread search engine in the world remains the best example of power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google PageRank algorithm surreal, which initially was responsible for the quality of Google search results, attracted by the precision of its inherent wisdom in the billions of Web links individual, that people create.

The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November, initially for Apple London, which gains its precision, in large part from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that users entered into its last decade. In the future, Google advantage of talking Query to predict with accuracy even more questions will require its users.

And a few weeks ago, Google has deployed a warning to identify trends of influenza, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.

The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of wireless sensors and the Internet - the location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars - has touched off a race to cash in on the collective intelligence technologies.

In 2006, Sense Networks, based in New York, has been proved that there are a multitude of useful information hidden in a digital archive of GPS data generated by tens of thousands of taxi rides from San Francisco. You might see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial district would tend to go to work earlier if the market was booming, but later, when he was down.

It also noted that people with average incomes - as determined by ZIP code data - tend to booths for several times, even before the market downturns.

Sens has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on smartphones like BlackBerry and London, and other companies interested in forecasting trends, social and financial behavior. Consumer demand, Citysense, identify hot spots of entertainment in a city. It connects yelp and information from Google about nightclubs and music clubs with the data generated by location tracking mobile users anonymous.

The second request Macrosense, is for companies to give insight into human activities. It uses a large database that merges GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency identification chips and other sensors.

“There is a whole new set of measurements that nobody has ever measured,” said Greg Skibiski, director of sense. “We were able to look at people moving around the shops and other locations. Such patterns of travel, together with data on income, retailers can give early discoveries in the levels of sales and purchases, which is the competitors’ stores.

Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is leading bedroom research project was co-founder of Sense Networks. It is part of a new generation of researchers, who have relatively effort to access the data in the past has been painstakingly assembled, either by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that are based on honesty and memories of the subjects.

Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the Japanese technology company to use some of laboratory technologies to improve the business’ performance. For example, by equipping with Sensor badges of employees who generate the same type of data by the students’ smartphones, the researchers determined that the face-to-face communication was far more important to an organization of work than was believed, in general.

Productivity improved 30 percent, with an incremental increase in face-to-face communication, said Dr. Pentland. The results were so promising that Hitachi has established a overhauls consulting business, through their researchers’ techniques.

Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation operating data through more traditional methods.

Dr. Pentland is the emperor network sensor research, “said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communication networks and their role in social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly chosen to interact with one another through digital recording means that traces of these interactions. “This allows scientists to study these interactions in ways that five years ago I would have thought we could do,” he said.

Once the network-based personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being designed to leverage the digital wireless networks, smartphones and sensors. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” network.

Center for Embedded Network Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, researchers are developing a service call a personal report of the environmental impact to build a community map air quality in Los Angeles. It is intended to allow people to assess how their activities affect the environment and to make decisions about their health. Users can decide to change their jogging route, or run for another long day, depending on air quality in time.

“Our Mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously unobservable,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the center and a computer scientist at UCLA

But Dr. Estrin said the project faced a series of challenges, both with precision and with small sensors researchers’ ability to ensure that personal information remains private. She is skeptical about the technical efforts to hide the identity of the individual contributors to databases of information collected by the network of sensors.

Attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited capacity, she said. Researchers encrypt data identification to protect against particular people, but has limits.

“Even if we are to protect the information is still subject to subpoena and subject to bullying bosses or spouses,” she said.

She says that there still may be ways to protect privacy. “I can imagine a system where the data will disappear,” she said.

Already, activist groups have seized on technology to improve the efficiency of their organization. A service called MobileActive helps non-profit organizations worldwide use mobile phones to capitalize on the expertise and energy of participants, by sending action alerts, for example.

Pachube (pronounced “patch bay”) is a Web service that lets people shares in real time from sensor data anywhere in the world. With Pachube, can combine and display sensor data, the cost of energy in a location to pollution and temperature monitoring for data flowing from a buoy off the coast of Charleston, SC, all the information to create a snapshot of-Laden in the world.

Such a complete and updated constantly redefine traditional image will undoubtedly notions of privacy.

DR. PENTLAND say that there are ways to avoid the surveillance-traps which lurk in the technology. For commercial use of such information, he proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to ensure that people have property rights to data about their behavior. The idea around three principles: that you have the right to own your own data, you control which data is collected about you, and can destroy, remove or reorganizing your data as desired.

At the same time, he argued that individual privacy rights, must also be weighed against the public good.

Quoting epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in recent years, he said technology would have helped health officials watch the movement of persons infected as it happened, which offers the possibility of limiting the spread of the disease.

“If I could be looking at the Mobile recordings could have been stopped in the morning, rather than a few weeks later,” he said. “I’m sorry, that the Trumps minute concerns about privacy.”

Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.

“The new instruments symbolized by the Internet are able to radically change how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the MIT Center for collective intelligence.

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where did all that was known by everybody knew,” said Dr. Malone. “In some sense we will become a global village. Privacy May prove to be become an anomaly.”