PITTSBURGH — Do wearable computers pose a threat to privacy?
That was the question du jour at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers Tuesday, where experts debated the likelihood of wearable-computing enthusiasts becoming a mobile army of surveillance and broadcast agents.
“The express aim of the wearable computer is to collect images, live video, facts about one’s own body,” said Anita Allen, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who sat on a panel considering the issue.
If the wearables concept takes off, she said, early adopters might be decking themselves out in clothes that contain or conceal miniscule computers, cameras, microphones — even Web servers.
“[Wearable owners want to] record what [someone] is saying and transmit what they’re saying across great distances and without their consent,” she said.
Allen and other panelists, mostly researchers involved in developing the wearable computer, wrestled with the privacy implications of the tiny computers that are only now beginning to leave the labs and hit the consumer radar.
Since developers of the new technology haven’t addressed this hot-button issue at all, Tuesday’s panel was intended to get the dialog going. Panel members quickly warmed to their task.
“We have one chance — at the beginning — to make sure there are explicit safeguards as to how people might use the technology,” said Thad Starner, cofounder of the Wearable Computing Project at MIT’s Media Lab.
Allen identified specific threats posed by some wearable computing applications, like in-the-field video beamed anywhere and nearly invisible cameras and keyboards that let their wearers silently collect information.
But the device could easily be turned on its user, Allen said. A wearable-computer user is always connected and always being monitored in some way. One obvious example is that the system tracks and broadcasts the user’s geographical location. Imagine that in the hands of creditors.
“The many little invasions amount to a huge problem for our culture,” Allen said. “Each individual person may think ‘my little device doesn’t do that much damage,’ but think about your device in combination with others.”
An Experiment in Mediaspace
Victoria Bellotti, a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, had the chance to experience life in a wearable-computing environment during a unique three-year project.
While at EuroPARC, PARC’s European headquarters, Bellotti and others set up what they called a “mediaspace.”
The group transformed the center’s offices into a fully networked audio-video infrastructure — right down to the researchers themselves. Everyone wore intelligent, “active” badges that identified them wherever they went. A continuously open audio-video connection connected all the offices.
Most importantly, a “diary” system tracked the comings and goings of badges to log people’s activities. The diary could tell where someone was in the office, for how long, and with whom. The system could automatically infer that gatherings were “meetings” and label them as such. Cameras also recorded the locations a badge-wearer was known to be in.
Though there were obvious business benefits to such an environment, the experience wasn’t always pleasant, Bellotti reported.
“Even in a benign environment like your research lab you can get people that react negatively because they feel like they’re being forced to take part.”
The critical issue, Bellotti found, was that the computer, rather than the badge-wearer, determined how a person was presented.
“Inasmuch as we add capabilities to these systems, we are taking control away from people…. We can expect problems from this.”
This kind of feeling can have a profound social effect as people begin to make decisions differently, Allen explained.
“With wearables, we can expect a person to develop modes of behavior less independent and less autonomous,” she said. If people are “in view” all the time, they might fear censure, so they begin to make decisions according to others’ expectations. “The Truman Show only worked until Truman discovered he was being observed,” she said.
Designing Now for Privacy
Recalling that it was the advent of pictures published in newspapers that awakened public concerns about the need for a right to privacy, Hill told the wearable-computing audience its day had come.
As panelist Henry Strub, researching wearable and user experiences at Interval Research Corporation, told designers: “How you feel about [the privacy issues of a device] yourself is one way to start exploring things.”
He also said he hoped future conferences focus as much on the implications of devices as on their design.
“Wearable computers aren’t, per se, a privacy problem,” Allen said. “Wearable computers can enhance privacy rather than diminish it.” For example, wearable-computer devices that help blind people sense their surroundings could make it less obvious that a person is visually impaired, she said. Today, his cane or seeing-eye dog announces his disability to the world.
As for the badge of annoyance, Bellotti had a simple fix: putting the badge’s activation back in the wearer’s hands.
“The lesson learned in the mediaspace is that you can go some way toward designing technology so it protects people’s privacy.”
