Open Source Sensing

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08/04/09--14:28: Ethical contracts for emotion sensors (chan 2206597)

Principled sensing will often involve getting permission from those being sensed. We can get some ideas about how to think about this process from the paper Affective Sensors, Privacy, and Ethical Contracts by two MIT Media lab researchers, Carson Reynolds (now at U. Tokyo) and Prof. Rosalind Picard. While not a new paper, [...]


08/05/09--11:46: Intuitive control, by you, of data sensed about you (chan 2206597)

David Kotz over at Dartmouth has been doing some interesting work on helping individuals control data sensed about us: As pervasive environments become more commonplace, the privacy of users is placed at increased risk. The numerous and diverse sensors in these environments can record users’ contextual information, leading to users unwittingly leaving “digital footprints.” Users must [...]


08/06/09--11:22: Separating raw sensor data from processed inferences (chan 2206597)

The sticky issue of who gets sensor data has been addressed by Guruduth Banavar and Abraham Bernstein in “Challenges in Design and Software Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Computing Applications” in the book Advances in Computers, Vol. 62, parts of which you can view at Amazon or Google Books: Gathering data of any kind irrevocably leads to privacy [...]


08/07/09--14:37: New EFF whitepaper on responsible sensing technology (chan 2206597)

Randall Lucas brings to our attention a new whitepaper over at EFF that will sound familiar to readers of this site: We can’t stop the cascade of new location-based digital services. Nor would we want to — the benefits they offer are impressive. What urgently needs to change is that these systems need to be built [...]


08/10/09--11:26: How long to keep unneeded sensor data? 10 minutes (chan 2206597)

A paper by researchers at University of Washington, Intel, and Dartmouth reports on Exploring Privacy Concerns about Personal Sensing. Some interesting data: In some cases, concerns about seemingly invasive sensors could be mitigated by changing the length of time that data were retained. While nearly half of the participants were unwilling to use GPS if [...]


08/11/09--17:46: The main reason to care who gets sensing data about you (chan 2206597)

An ITU paper spells out the main reason to care who gets sensing data about individuals: From a political standpoint privacy is generally considered to be an indispensable ingredient for democratic societies. This is because it is seen to foster the plurality of ideas and critical debate necessary in such societies… • Privacy is also a regulating [...]


08/12/09--15:24: Electronic surveillance includes your physical location (chan 2206597)

Not everyone realizes that “electronic” surveillance can include not just what we think of as electronic information (email, etc.) but physical data as well. In an EFF article on the UK’s half million intercepts of communications data in 2008 — which has no judicial review — this is explained: These orders can reveal lists of [...]


08/13/09--15:06: Code of Fair Sensing Practices? (chan 2206597)

Simson Garfinkel gave a talk a while back that examined the “Code of Fair Information Practices”, developed originally by a U.S. government task force and described thusly: • There must be no personal data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret. • There must be a way for a person to find out what information [...]


09/03/09--01:05: Sensor scenarios for nanotech-enabled chemical & biological defense (chan 2206597)

A new book Nanotechnology for Chemical and Biological Defense, ed. Margaret Kosal (Springer, 2009), includes sensor scenarios for nanotech-based defense against chemical and biological attacks. As is usual with scenario planning, multiple versions are presented, in this case reaching out to the year 2030. Here’s one from the “Radical Game Changers” scenario: A terrorist [...]


09/07/09--14:44: When to share the raw data & when not to (chan 2206597)

Russ Nelson sends this nomination: This website encourages people to publish the raw data directly from their hydrologic sensors. Seems to me like they’re the poster child for open source sensing. http://his.cuahsi.org/index.html For scientific purposes, sharing the raw data (in addition to any interesting conclusions) is the way to go. In sensing situations where there are [...]