Google Is Watching, Perhaps Soon In Your HomeResearchers propose gathering personal data by tracking people's activities at home through home network interactions.
By Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek
July 11, 2008
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208808510Undeterred by the persistent worries of privacy advocates and government officials that it knows too much, Google hungers for more data. To augment the information the company collects from its users online -- the links they click, the searches they make, and related metrics -- Google's researchers are looking beyond the Internet.
A recent paper co-authored by Google researcher Bill N. Schilit, and computer scientists Jeonghwa Yang (Georgia Tech) and David W. McDonald (University of Washington) proposes "home activity recognition," or tracking people's activities at home through home network interactions.
"Activity recognition is a key feature of many ubiquitous computing applications ranging from office worker tracking to home health care," the paper explains. "In general, activity recognition systems unobtrusively observe the behavior of people and characteristics of their environments, and, when necessary, take actions in response -- ideally with little explicit user direction."
The goal of such monitoring might be to "remind users to perform missed activities or complete actions (like taking medicine), help them recall information, or encourage them to act more safely," the paper suggests.
As applied to the elderly, such monitoring might seem entirely sensible. Others might find such oversight Orwellian.
Is it comforting or frightening to think of Google looking after one's health? "Information about household activities can even be used to recommend changes in behavior -- for example, to reduce TV viewing and spend more time playing aerobic games on the Wii," the paper suggests.
Just wait for the pop-up menu that says, "Type faster, porky."
Whether the future Google is exploring is benevolent, malevolent or just the way things will be, such a scheme raises questions about sanctity of the data describing one's activities at home. How would that data be protected? Who would have access to it? What would prevent it from being subpoenaed or stolen?
The paper presents a sample "Web-based network activity visualizer," a record similar to a Web history log, except that it lists home network activities like "listen to music," "watch Internet TV," and "read newspaper." If and when other appliances interact with home networks, the list might also include "opened refrigerator," "used treadmill," and so on.
This isn't just an isolated foray into service-oriented surveillance. Google has been conducting related research into monitoring people's TV watching to deliver content relevant to the broadcast.
In a research paper presented in 2006 at an interactive television conference in Greece, Google researchers Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja describe a way to use ambient-audio identification technology to capture TV sound, identify it, and return personalized Internet content to the PC doing the monitoring.
The theme of tracking as a way of obtaining data surfaces in other research, and it's not just Google looking for veins of data. Microsoft is headed in the same direction. Another recent paper, "A Case for Usage Tracking to Relate Digital Objects," by Google's Elin Rnby Pedersen and Microsoft's Jeanine Spence, suggests that the shift toward online applications will make monitoring what people do with their computers much easier.
"Going forward we are eager to find alternative sources for interaction event capture," the paper says. "Rather than just waiting for the desktop operating systems to accommodate user activity tracking, we see the Web platform as a potential shortcut to a friendlier environment for activity capture."
Google, and perhaps everyone else, is watching. Enjoy having your activities captured.
Thanks, Harry!
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