Tag Archives: New York Times

Beating a Dead Horse: NYT Article on Collecting Phone Data to Track Public Services is a Press Release

A June 6, 2011, article by Joshua Brustein in The New York Times read as a press release for the private corporations wanting to use cell phone data to monitor and track public services. The article outlines companies that want to collect and data mine behavioral information from cell phones that have those companies’ apps. For example, you have the FPrivacy app by LastLaugh, Inc., and LastLaugh collects your cell phone location and activity, and then uses that data to monitor travel times between different points (e.g., traffic reports, determining when a given subway train will reach its destination). While the idea is interesting, the article essentially regurgitates company press releases and fails to look critically at the idea in at least three simple areas: the role of the public sector, alternative ideas, and privacy. In the eyes of the Facebook generation, an even graver mistake is that it is old news!

Missing Item 1: Where is Local Government?
The article did not even tease the reader with the notion that the local government, through the various agencies that manage public transportation, ought to be providing services that increase our understanding of public transportation, including when to expect the next train. The combination of the right’s dismissal of government having a legitimate place in our lives and the left’s inability to firmly push government agencies to smartly and quickly adopt useful technologies means that we do not think of the government as being an appropriate actor for these types of initiatives.

Missing Item 2: Alternative Ideas
Somewhat related to Missing Item 1 is the fact that the article fails to suggest alternative ideas, whether those ideas are real or on e-ink. Furthermore, we have an incredibly inelegant solution (for these types of problems) in the use of tens of thousands of cell phones as data collectors. For example, there is a significant imputation problem in that for many commutes, “the system” has to make a(n educated) guess about which train or mode of transportation the phone took. Even the article mentions this:

If a phone located near Times Square suddenly loses service and reconnects at Prince Street and Broadway 15 minutes later, then it has almost certainly traveled there using the N or R trains.

A specific cut at this imputation issue is the fact that the approach aggregates very general/inexact data when what is desired is very precise data. This is because what matters is not the activity of an individual psuedo-anonymous cell phone, but the activity of an individual known public transportation vehicle. As a result, the data demands a host of assumptions that fight against the wall of ecological fallacies and other methodological issues.

An alternative idea is to simply equip public transportation vehicles with tracking equipment. At that point, the most precise data possible is collected and aggregating up to more general levels becomes easier. Furthermore, there are no privacy concerns. Even better, many public transportation systems already have this capability!

Missing Item 3: Privacy
Okay, privacy is mentioned, but only in the final sentence of the article:

This could be a challenge, as it is clear that many people are uncomfortable with technology companies or government agencies tracking their every move.

Perhaps I should be thankful, since Brustein finally brings the public sector into the discussion. Instead, though, I ask myself, “That’s it?” The article talks about (admittedly, opt-in) methods for tracking every location and travel route a person’s cell phone takes, as well as every conversation one has*, but the only love privacy is shown is a single sentence that reads as if it was written by a junior-high student.

* One company wants to use phones’ microphones to identify locational atmospherics, a method that is smeared with a smile by phrasing it as a way to determine whether you are on a bus.

Getting Meta: Media

I have little love for media practices, whether that’s the individual journalists or the larger companies. Although they do, or try to do, important work that goes largely unrecognized and under considered by the public, they largely fail at their mission to educate and report. For the most part, this is because they fail to reflect on the theoretical or bigger picture roles and consequences they have. In this way, they are similar to politicians and policy makers (vis-a-vis political scientists) and medical professionals (vis-a-vis medical researchers). Two recent news stories highlight their inability to understand the world in which they work.

The first news story is the extensive reporting that a significant number of Americans believe President Barack Obama is a Muslim. The stories I read focused on the politics of this, often times relating it to the 2008 presidential campaign. What these articles failed to do is critically examine the absurd failure of the media to educate and inform the public, the media’s primary mission. Allowing this sort of clear factual inaccuracy and not forcing a epistemological debate on the issue is not a reflection of the “stupidity” or beliefe structure of people, but the absolute collapse of the critical examination and discussion in the fourth estate.

The second news story is this NY Times blog entry about whether the best war-reporting method is as an embedded journalist or not. The reason this is important is because it illustrates the media’s tendency to both create and fall in love with false dichotomies. Why are these the two principal choices? Why is reporting not considered a comprehensive, multi-method approach? In large part, and something I mention at the start of this post, it is because journalists have left the theoretical or meta considerations of their vocation behind, as have policy makers and medical professionals. Without having theory as your guide and critical/scientific considerations in mind, any group will work in a stupefyingly manner. And it is not that this is the only instance of false dichotomies; we see it everyday on talk shows, in reporting only on two main parties, on granting equal time for statements that are wrong or lies, and in their self characterizations (e.g., old vs. new media, print vs. online media).

These criticisms connect to my larger eye rolling at the media. That is, they successfully portray themselves as victims, whether it’s a victim of their readers (not buying newspapers!), the establishment (they lied to us!), or the economy (ad revenues are down!). The truth is the media has itself to blame, whether we’re talking about media companies taking on too much debt, buying unrelated enterprises, not recognizing the shift to digital and online readership, or not improving their product (why can’t I buy one subscription and read it anywhere, whether that’s in print, on the Web, or on a mobile device, such as an eReader?). And we should not leave out the journalists, who fail to bring critical eyes to their work, go for page views, and fail to realize that dependency on sources leads to bad reporting. All of these factors explain why daily journalism is trying to find itself, but that investigative journalism is hitting its stride, based on profits, subscription numbers, and new outlets.

eViting Terror into Your Inbox

People know I have intensely disliked eVite (no, they, like MySpace, are not link worthy) from Day One. Most people just chalk it up to me being crazy and a pure Internetist, but it is much more than that.

Thankfully, LW e-mailed me a NYT article that kind of lays out the reasons why “eVite sucks”. Some selected quotes from the article:

I want to be grateful for an invitation, but I feel harassed. Unlike the sweet, promising envelopes that sometimes arrive with the real mail, tulips in the weeds of fliers for gym memberships, Evites mix the forced cheer of advertising with the stern bullying of debt-collecting. It’s a party! First notice. Second notice. Where’s your R.S.V.P.?! We’d love to see you! Late fee.

and

Let’s take stock of where Diller has left the partying world. Evite commodifies hospitality. It co-opts the benevolence of hosts by using them to drive traffic to an ad platform. It makes would-be guests seem boorish if they’re reluctant to conduct their social lives on the Web. And it turns every party into one of those shell-game publicity “events” where Star X has to believe that Star Y is coming in order to show up herself.

Thankfully, I have at least one friend (SD) who spares me the horror of eVites and sends me a personalized e-mail with the relevant information. To the others, I always include an “eVite sucks” conclusion to my note.

Starting now, though, I also plan to include a TinyURL link to this NYT article, and I encourage you to do the same:

http://tinyurl.com/4z73o8