New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Huuuge Win for Privacy

By Gordon Hull

Santa Claus knows when you’ve been sleeping, knows when you’re awake, and knows if you’ve been bad or good.  Your phone knows all of that too, because it knows exactly where you are.  It then sends all that information to your carrier, which keeps it in its logs for five years.  Stay out late drinking last night?  Your phone knows. Had an affair a couple of years ago? Your phone knows that, too. Get up early for a workout and then work?  Yep, your phone knows that too.  Up until today, it was pretty easy for the police to know it as well, as they were able to subpoena your phone’s geolocation records from your phone carrier.  Under the “third party doctrine” as articulated primarily in Smith v. Maryland (1978), you lose any expectation of privacy over information that you "voluntarily" hand over to someone else – this this case, your phone carrier.  In a 5-4 opinion today, Chief Justice Roberts and the four liberals on the Court refused to apply third party doctrine to phone location data.  Justice Roberts writes:

“We decline to extend Smith and Miller [a case where the government subpoenaed bank records- GH] to cover these novel circumstances. Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user’s claim to Fourth Amendment protection. Whether the Government employs its own surveillance technology as in Jones or leverages the technology of a wireless carrier, we hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through CSLI. The location information obtained from Carpenter’s wireless carriers was the product of a search”

As Roberts noted at the start of the opinion (which, btw, is a model of legal writing), the Fourth Amendment was originally motivated in substantial part by concern over generalized warrants.  His conclusion is therefore not a surprise.  Indeed, tapping phone records pretty much achieves everything a general warrant hoped for; as Roberts notes, “a cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales. Accordingly, when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user” (internal citations omitted).  And of course it does so with absolutely zero police effort.  When the GDR Stasi wanted to track your every move, they at least had to assign an officer to do it.  Here, the data is collected automatically and without human intervention.

The Big Data Train Chugs On, Predictive Personality Edition

By Gordon Hull

One of the things that marketers like about big data is that they can personalize ads.  That operation is getting increasingly sophisticated.  We’ve known for a while that basic personality traits (like introversion/extraversion) can be predicted from Facebook likes.  I missed this paper when it came out, but some of the same authors as the initial Facebook “likes” paper have now done the inevitable follow-up.  By targeting Facebook ads on the basis of openness and extraversion (where the correlation with likes is fairly robust), they were able to make users 1.54 times more likely to make a purchase (thus about 40% more likely) than with non-“psychologically-tailored” advertising.  The study size, as with most research on FB, is enormous – the study reached some 3.5 million users (a point the authors use to try to defuse some objections).  The authors duly note the murky ethical issues that emerge: on the one hand, you could proactively try to assist people who show signs of depression; on the other hand, weaknesses like susceptibility to addictive gambling or dubious political targeting could be exploited.  That observation is pretty obvious now, in the wake of Cambridge Analytics.  Two other takeaways stood out more to me.  First, the study predicted personality on the basis of only one like.  As the authors note, that means the study likely underestimates the potential effect of psychological targeting.  Second, the authors emphasize that a point that a lot of us have been trying to make for a while: that these results undermine a lot of the current regulatory strategy for privacy. I’ll let them speak:

Malthus’ Marshmallow

By Gordon Hull

We’ve all heard of a version of the experiment: you set a kid down with a marshmallow, and tell him that if he can sit there and not eat it for a while, he can have two.  Some kids can do it, and others can’t.  A famous paper suggests that whether the child has the willpower to wait is predictive of his future success in life.  Apparently, not so much.  According to a piece by Jessica McCrory Calarco in the Atlantic, new research casts this finding into doubt.  It seems that the original study enrolled fewer than 90 children, all of them selected from Stanford’s lab school.  Let’s just call that an unrepresentative sample.  A new, larger and more representative study concludes that willpower isn’t what’s driving the result; it’s socioeconomic status.  As Calarco puts it, “the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.”  For example, once you factor in whether the mother has a college degree or not, the children’s ability to wait wasn’t predictive: