andrew mcstay slides empathic media #datapowerconf
TRANSCRIPT
Conceiving empathic media and outlining stakeholder interests
With some surprising results and provocations
Andrew McStay, Bangor University, UK
Tw: digi_ad
• The capacity for emergent media technologies to sense and interpret what is significant for people, act on their emotional states, understand perspectives, and make use of their intentions and expressions.
• … achieved by assessment of language selection, speech, facial expression recognition, behaviour, bodily movement and responses to sensory and affective stimuli, and by acting appropriately on peoples’ reactions.
• An interpretive act (not a 6th sense and not about sympathy)
Perspectives• Regulators (ICOs and European Data Commissioners)
• Analytics firms (such as Crimson Hexagon and eXelate)
• Ad agencies/comms firms (big ones such as JWT and small like B-Reel)
• Games companies and user experience consultants (such Player Research and This Place)
• Wearables companies (from Google Glass arm to start-ups such as Spire)
• Angel investors (the end point of this talk)
This much we know, but there’s more…
• Very different order of data from behavioural advertising (more corporeal and less abstract than cookie-based mining)
• Empathic media companies not reliant on personal data (toxic data)
• Shift in market towards anonymous, aggregated data that provides insights and trends for marketers, but protects user identity (reflected in new Euro GDPR too).
• Every reason to suggest insights will be bundled with programmatic logic (as shown in eXelate slide)
• …the principles of protection shall not apply to data rendered anonymous in such a way that the data subject is no longer identifiable …(95/46/EC, Recital 26)
• Soft biometrics (versus hard as employed by border control, for example) (Article 29, Opinion 3/2012)
• No consent required (and seemingly even less protection in new General Protection Data Regulation [lots of vague statements on ‘legitimate interests’])
Moral limits to data markets
*And friends of privacy in strange places*• John Taysom: pro-privacy angel investor, Board member of the Web Science Trust, Policy Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge, CEO Reuters Venture Capital, etc…
• Not keen on governments seeking to “abuse social contracts or businesses that over-step the mark”
• “Increasing commodification of human existence is a form of corruption that undermines relationships with each other and of the individual with society”
• Market opportunities in privacy, wholesale reform of the data industry and unusual friends in financial places (can anyone but industry actors/innovators/start-ups deliver data industry reform?)
• Apple’s privacy re-brand (encryption, no access to keys, HealthKit (from steps to sex life tracking), HomeKit (who knows what is coming!)
• Ben Wizner (ACLU, Lawyer of Edward Snowden): we are going to need corporations to helps us defeat government excesses (Snowden also pro-Apple privacy stance)
Questions I am grappling with• Does it matter that data miners commodify emotional life? (If so, specifically,
why?)
• Or, is non-PII the golden solution (free content but regulations on toxic personal data)?
• How does biometric and emotional information contribute to the shaping of social life (particularly when emotions are inseparably involved in cognitive and decision-making processes)?
• What of moral limits to markets? Is there one in the case of non-PII? If so, again, specifically, why?
• What of consent? (Is the equating of consent with PII good enough? For now we can simply not use emotionally-sensitive technologies, but this will not be practical forever)
• What are the surveillant opportunities (n.b. Snowden leaks already indicate interest in gaming>biometrics>arousal>emotional inference)
• Is existing privacy theory/criticism based on identification up to the task of dealing with empathic media?