How your life will be run by the network

From The Sunday Times
June 20, 2009
Focus: How your life will be run by the network
The way we shop, travel and talk to our family and friends will be transformed by the new generation of mobile phones
A girl with an Apple iPhone
John Arlidge

It is called the Spark Room and it takes pride of place in the shiny new offices of Logica, the technology firm in King’s Cross, north London. A sign above the door reads “This is where you come in”. It is an invitation to the firm’s geeks to peer into the future, laptops in one hand, lattes in the other.

On computer screens, what looks to the untrained eye like a series of dots and squiggles, graphs and web pages are downloading at great speed.

Each one represents people: you and me. They move, like us. They talk, like us. They are us.

The images are the building blocks of the biggest revolution in IT since the advent of the internet — and one that will eventually have a direct impact on the lives of almost everyone.

“We’re not talking about something that we’ve always known would be good but could not work out how to make happen,” explained Elaine Doherty, Logica’s head of media innovation. “What we’re doing is something that was unimaginable even five years ago.”

Doherty is talking about “collective intelligence”, or “the network”. It is the latest buzzword to leak out of California’s Silicon Valley.

For a big idea it is remarkably simple. It means a world in which people are permanently connected to anything and everything: to our friends and families, to our employer, to our home, doctor, bank, even to our past, present and future.

The squiggles and dots on Doherty’s screens represent those links, produced by a complex — and secret — algorithm that runs using Logica’s new Interaction software.

How does it work? It is all down to the mobile phone. Thanks to hardware advances and super-fast 3G network connections, phones have become handheld mini-computers capable of running just about any program you can think of — e-mail, online maps, YouTube, news, the weather, share prices.

If you don’t have one yet, the likelihood is that you will soon. The new-generation phones are spreading rapidly through the population. Apple launched its latest version of the iPhone last week and has already sold more than 40m examples of the previous models in just two years. Worldwide there is one mobile phone for every adult.

As we use them, our phones record the details of our lives. Global positioning technology, wi-fi and Bluetooth in our handsets reveal where we are down to the nearest few feet, when we go to work, when we get home and where we like to go at weekends. For the fully plugged-in, an online calendar shows where we have just been and where we will be next. Social networking sites reveal who our friends are. Location services reveal where they are.

Thanks to our online search history, phones know our interests: what food, music, sports, authors, fashion designers and holiday destinations we like. When we start using our handsets as “swipe-and-pay” wallets, in a similar style to London’s transport Oyster cards, they will record our purchases as well.

Generating a “digital profile” online is not new. We leave digital fingerprints every time we surf the web on our computers. But that information is static: we do not carry our computers around everywhere we go. We do take our phones everywhere, though, and that changes everything. It creates a crucial “bridge” between the virtual world and the real world.

“We’re generating an entirely new ecosystem of data, far richer than anything before,” said Chris Lane, head of strategy at Vodafone, the mobile phone company. “It shows where people are, what they do and when they do it and can even ‘learn’ and ‘predict’ likely future behaviour.”

High-tech companies are excited about the network because by studying our real-time behaviour — “reality mining” as techie-types call it — they can create products tailored for each of us and offered to us precisely when and where they hope we will want them.

In the Spark Room, Doherty calls up a screen that will be available from next month. A mobile phone user, who has given permission for service providers to track her mobile use, walks into a shopping mall at 10am. Her calendar shows she is meeting a friend to buy shoes, then have lunch. As she enters, she receives an electronic message with a voucher offering 20% off the shoes she likes — wedges — at her favourite store and a map to the shop.

Her search history reveals that she likes sushi, so just before 12.30pm, after buying the shoes, she receives another message with a voucher for a two-for-one sushi lunch offer.

While the two women are eating their California rolls, they check their phones and find that two of their Facebook friends have just entered the mall. They instant-message them and invite them for lunch. “The girls get the shoes they want for less money, they get a cheap lunch and they get to meet their friends. Everybody wins,” claimed Doherty.

The network can create and improve almost any kind of product or service, its supporters say. Take in-car satellite navigation. TomTom, the Dutch sat nav firm, has abandoned static cameras and roadside sensors to monitor traffic movements and instead now tracks the speed at which mobile phones in cars travel — via GPS and wi-fi. This not only allows the firm to spot traffic jams when they happen, it can also predict them before they happen by calculating how many cars are likely to arrive at a pinch-point at the same time.

Microsoft is working on a similar traffic management scheme in Birmingham which also tells drivers where to find a parking space.

The network promises to transform advertising, too, producing the kind of targeted adverts seen in the futuristic Tom Cruise film Minority Report. Marketeers use signals from web-enabled devices to identify different types of consumer. By tracking where they live, where they go to work and where they go to relax, they know their patterns of behaviour and get an idea of what they earn. That makes it easier to target adverts at the people most likely to respond to them.

“We can place ads for beer on electronic billboards near bars, where we know people who drink beer go, at the time they go there and do the same with wine near wine bars at the time that wine drinkers like to go,” said Steve Ridley of Kinetic, an advertising firm.

The network is not all about business, though. Our digital footprints have social and civic uses, too. By analysing how we travel on foot, by road or on the train, town planners and transport bodies are changing the fabric of our cities.

Path Intelligence, based in Hampshire, uses phone data to help planners smooth the flow of pedestrians through railway stations, airports and shopping centres. Rather than relying on snapshot surveys, it can analyse the real-time flows of real people. The network also helps doctors and health professionals: search engines, notably Google, are already using web searches to help health authorities predict the spread of viruses such as swine flu. People are more likely to search for the symptoms of the illness on the internet before they visit their doctor, goes the logic. A sudden spike in searches for swine flu symptoms in a particular location might indicate an imminent outbreak.

In Portland, Oregon, doctors monitor elderly people who live alone via mobile phone. The patients carry their phone and the handset “learns” their daily routine. If there is a sudden marked divergence from their normal pattern, the phone alerts healthcare services that something might be wrong.

For all its apparent advantages there are several practical problems — and one serious ethical one — that might hamper the development of the network.

It depends on web-enabled mobiles with broadband services, which are expensive. Many people already complain that we are drowning in data — e-mail, text messages, social networking sites — and they will probably regard joining the network as becoming a slave to the machine and will instead choose to “go dark”.

Then there is the big issue: privacy. Many consumers will be reluctant to hand over their digital fingerprint to third parties for fear their data might be misused. Some American firms are already tracking employees’ movements and e- mail use to find out who are the most — and least — productive.

Steve Steinberg, a US technology analyst, described the network as “one of the most significant technology trends I have seen — and maybe one of the most pernicious. The social paranoia it heralds could be worse than any authoritarian bureaucracy”.

Operators say safeguards exist to protect users. The new services are “opt-in”, which means we have to agree to allow operators to monitor our web use and our location. All data is anonymised. Users are identified by a string of numbers, not by name.

Will the network take off? The evidence suggests that consumers may overcome their fears about privacy. Indeed, most of us accept some form of monitoring already. We accept that Google monitors our search history because it gives us better search results. We allow Amazon to record our buying history to recommend products we might want.

James Braden, a technology analyst, said the network has all the right qualities to spread rapidly. “History shows that market-changing technologies are ones that enable a broad class of people to do what, previously, only an elite class could do,” he said.

“That’s exactly what the network does. It gives individuals and companies access to the kind of information only previously available to the likes of governments and vast corporations.”

If the analysts are right, we might soon start thinking very differently about the hyper-connected world we live in. In particular, we might rethink our view of personal data, coming to regard it more as something to be traded, like money, rather than hoarded and protected. We might even be willing to give some of it away, provided we get something in return.

As Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, put it: “Using mobile services involves a cost/benefit decision, but we think people will see that the benefits are greater than the potential cost.”

While the new laboratory of human behaviour and relations grows, the supremacy of the individual’s privacy, which has dominated the debate over technology, may give way to something new. Just as the introduction of the PC desktop with its click-and-drag files and folders transformed the way we think of organising basic information, so the network is creating a new metaphor for organising our lives.

We are never going to embrace Big Brother, but could we learn to love the little brother in our pocket? Maybe.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article6544646.ece