Every digital service collects and uses data. When you search for a restaurant in an app, you disclose your location, the time of day, your taste preferences, and your budget. Do you know which digital services the restaurant search passes your data on to? Do you know what data your smartwatch collects during meals and when paying, and who uses it?
Let's observe Tom Biber, an architect, for a day. Immediately after waking up, he checks his mail and messages. He loudly swears at a colleague who was supposed to join him for today's project presentation but canceled at the last minute. He checks his schedule for the day, the expected driving time to his client, his phone and video appointments, and finally checks an evening meal reservation and his hotel check-in time.
His navigation app automatically uses his client's address from his calendar. During breakfast, he discusses weekend plans with his wife Eva. On the way to his client, he stops at a fast-food restaurant. There, he pays with the Pay function on his smartwatch. While eating, he looks at the attendees of the project presentation in his customer relationship app, looks at their photos and sees the names of their children, and scrolls through their recent posts on Instagram
The project presentation partially takes place in Metodon, an Extended Reality app, where participants can virtually move through the planned building while also being able to see each other. The session is recorded by an electronic project secretary, who simultaneously creates a protocol from what is said and distributes it to the participants. For dinner, Tom has arranged to meet with two representatives of his client.
Since he has plenty of time between the presentation and dinner, he makes some phone calls and participates in a virtual conference in Metodon. Afterwards, he wants to relax, so he lies down in his hotel room and reads the daily news in an online edition of the newspaper. During the presentation, Tom noticed that the client's project manager was obviously interested in him. They got closer over dinner, ending the evening together in his hotel room. Once he's alone again, he thinks back on the whole day and considers which data he has left where. He's not an IT specialist. But he nonetheless makes the assumption that he has been almost constantly under surveillance.
💬 Communication
In mails and messaging, he has documented his opinion on various topics. His curse about the colleague has been recognized as such and recorded by his smartwatch. His employer can see that Tom is already preparing for his client visit early in the morning, showing high motivation. The client's conversation partners find out from LinkedIn, Instagram, and other services that Tom has already looked into them. The smart speaker on the kitchen table follows the conversation between Tom and his wife Eva, inferring a beach hotel search, interest in a sailing excursion, and the names of the other participants in the weekend trip.
🍕 Food
The fast food restaraunt can find out Tom's food preferences, bank details, and geographical location from his order, it can even find out how long he stayed in the restaurant based on wifi data. This data can help his supermarket have the right products in stock and with the placement of targeted advertisements. However, it can also inform his general practitioner and health app about what he has consumed.
🧳 Travel
Since Tom took longer than planned to eat, he tries to make up time on the journey and drives more aggressively than usual. The car, navigation system, and his smartwatch document Tom's driving behavior. The car calculates the remaining battery mileage from this. His car insurance uses the data for his risk assessment, the health app to monitor the effect on his blood pressure, and the navigation system to evaluate the travel time. The police could detect speeding and other traffic violations and issue fines.
👨💻 The Meeting
Metodon, the aforementioned Extended Reality system where Tom presents his design of a new operating room, collects data using various sensors. Gaze detection observes what each participant is looking at, for example, to display a unique perspective of the plan to each participant. But it also recognizes which people are looking at each other for how long and whether their pupils dilate or contract. The microphone detects the tone of voice and can deduce whether a person is stressed or relaxed. The smartwatch can simultaneously measure blood pressure and heart rate. This data helps Tom understand the reaction to his presentation, helps the client evaluate the behavior of their employees for further training or assessment, and provides the designer with information about which parts of the presentation need improvement in the future. Metodon could tell Tom that the project manager is looking at him remarkably often for a prolonged amount of time.
🍽️ Dinner
Tom’s smartphone and smartwatch track conversations during dinner, identify who is discussing which topics, who is bored during dinner, and who is talking to whom the most.
🏨 Hotel
In the hotel, the smartphone data shows that Tom enters the room with the project manager, how long they stay there, and what activities take place. The smartwatch can deduce this in detail, considering that it even recognizes whether someone is swimming on their back or front while swimming, which heart rate and blood pressure are associated with it, and what sounds can be heard. If Tom reads the day's news before falling asleep, the news app can determine how quickly he reads, whether he is focused, whether he reads the same passage multiple times, which sentences he highlights, and which he just skims over. Day by day the news app gains a clearer picture of Tom's interests.
🏠 Integration
All digital services collect data about us, whether they are sensors in cars and households, apps to communicate with people and machines, or online games and the metaverse. This data collection during a workday for Tom is already largely feasible today—and it's happening. How interconnected the data is and how much it is actually used by internet giants, intelligence agencies, police, insurers, health services, etc., is extremely difficult or even impossible for Tom and other citizens to comprehend. Like most of us, Tom relies on the honesty of service providers, their promises of data protection, and the fact that they would suffer enormous reputational damage for violations. By observing the use of such data, for example, in crime fighting after terrorist attacks, one can gain an impression of the possibilities available and used as early as 2024.
Data collection presents huge opportunities and dangers for individuals and society. For every app we must consider which data it collects, which other app gets access to this data, and what it does with it.
🤔 Questions:
· Would you give Apple access to your data such as blood sugar, heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, conversations, and movements if Apple Health could provide an early warning of an oncoming heart attack or timely notification of cancer?
· Would you give Instagram or Linkedin your location and contact details if it meant you could double your number of followers?
· Would you turn off your smartwatch during an affair?
💭 Messages:
Digital services accompany us in all areas of life and collect data.
We are not aware of who collects which data about us.
Data protection and data usage are competing goals.
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