Meaning of privacy when `they' know you better than you know yourself

By Jason Lim

A few years ago, Uber got into public relations trouble when they published a blog post describing how they can analyze ridership data to infer certain behavior on the part of riders: “One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns…we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep).”

This was over two years ago, and you can be sure that Uber knows much more about many more people’s behavior than they did then. And it’s not just Uber, of course. Amazon’s recent triumph with Alexa, the AI-infused personal assistant, means that Amazon now knows pretty much every single thing that you and your family members do on an everyday basis. If you add this on top of all the shopping, reading, and video-watching data that Amazon has about you, it’s not that difficult to create a strawman for what type of everyday choices you make. But you can’t leave out Facebook, which boasts 1.8 billion active users around the world who spends an average time of 20 minutes per login. Also, 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared daily as of May 2013 and 300 million photos are uploaded every day. It’s no exaggeration when it’s reported that Facebook knows when you are about to make a decision to marry or divorce even before you have consciously become aware of the decision yourself.

But this is all old news already. The next big technological breakthrough seems to be in intelligent robots that can socially engage with human beings in a natural way. Needless to say, the porn industry is all over this, as it was with videotapes, DVD, virtual reality, and internet video streaming. Whatever your opinion might be, porn has been a leading player in the human-technology interface space for a long time.

Granted, there are companies like Realdolls and TrueCompanion that already sell hyper-realistic silicon sex dolls for upwards of $10,000. Now imagine that those dolls are actually robots built on an artificial intelligence engine that can interact with you not merely as a sex toy but as a full-fledged companion in the bedroom.

“Use of artificial intelligence (AI) devices in the bedroom will be socially normal within 25 years.” This is what participants heard at last December’s International Congress of Love and Sex with Robotics (yes, there is such a thing already). Moreover, Kate Devlin, a computing expert at Goldsmiths, University of London, said it was probable future sex robots would be designed to learn their human partner’s sexual preferences to improve performance. “Companion” devices such as the Pepper robot are being increasingly used to provide stimulation to elderly people, particularly in Asian countries such as Japan. Created two years ago, the humanoid robot is designed with the ability to read certain emotions from analyzing expressions and voice tones.”

What’s happening here is that all these seemingly disparate companies from Amazon, Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, Uber and even Tesla are essentially “big data” companies that happen to sell services or products that act as data collection platforms. And the data they are collecting are behavioral data on you. When all the data around your everyday interactions with these services is aggregated, it will be a more accurate representation of you than your own idea of who you think you are. Add to that the possibility that you will now have intimate companions (they don’t really even have to be sex dolls _ personal assistants like Alexa are intimate enough) who can collect, analyze, and map your behavioral data to your cognitive, emotional data. In short, this is the digital you, even in your most private behavior. And it can all be reproduced digitally to look, act, sound and even decide like you.

At this point, this is no longer a matter of securing your privacy. It’s securing your self-identity. Are you the digital you that these companies have created based on your actual everyday behavior? Or are you that person you always thought you were? Worse, who owns and controls your digital self?

Needless to say, the security implications are enormous. How do you secure yourself against your own digital self that you no longer own?

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. Reach him at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook.com/jasonlimkoreatimes or @jasonlim2012.