Are you being watched? It’s more than you think!
WiFi usage is increasing every day. From coffee shops and restaurants to national chain grocery stores, staying connected with WiFi has never been easier. But a hidden feature of this ubiquity is that WiFi is no longer just a conduit for you to watch cat videos on YouTube. Now, providers, such as Purple WiFi are either developing data analytics suites or partnering with data analytics companies to learn more and more about you. Anything from your spending habits (knowing you like buying caramel macchiatos at your local coffee shop) to how much time you spend at the grocery store is now grist for companies to use.
There are many items of interest gathered each time you connect to the network. Anything you make public on social media such as Facebook is available for these companies to collect and leverage. What is your age? Are you male or female? What school did you go to? Making this information public on Facebook allows these companies to make a complete sketch of you.
You can always opt out of being tracked, by not logging into the network. However, whether or not you log into the network, certain items of information are collected. MAC Addresses (the unique identifier of your phone, computer, or device) and distance from the Access Point (WiFi Hub) through Received Strength Signal Indicator (RSSI) algorithms are collected even without authentication.
And this is just one entry in a point of data. The information gathered on this visit can be compared with other data points and determine frequency and duration of your visits, where you go afterward, and much else that is not immediately apparent at first glance. All this information gathered together can help predict your patterns and behaviours and allow companies to use that to influence your behaviour and spending habits. And this data can then be sold to other organizations for re-purposing and new rounds of aggregation and analysis.
Now, this can be a good thing. Your coffee shop might find out that you are a relatively frequent visitor but for some reason may not go very often on Fridays. One thing the proprietor can do is send you a coupon that only works on Fridays, trying to entice you to visit when you normally wouldn’t. Another example is that a store layout may be adjusted to conform to your spending habits, putting your favourite snacks closer to soft drinks you frequently consume.
But it can also have bad implications, and not all of them are clear at first glance. There are many privacy issues that arise from being tracked. But there are less obvious examples, even for people who don’t mind the slight invasion of privacy. Maybe, on those Fridays that you are not a customer of the shop, you are taking a cross-fit class. If you are looking for an excuse to miss a class, this could undermine your goals.
This is a new field. Much research is being done on the ethical ramifications of data analytics. Privacy issues are of course a main topic of conversation, but there other, more subtle concerns that can lead to ethical conundrums:
- Bias – ‘The numbers do not lie’ is a common saying. However, problems can be introduced in collecting those numbers. If no women answer an ad, the dataset collected will not reflect women’s views on the ad, which could skew decision making.
- Interpretability of model – If a model cannot be easily understood in natural language, then it is difficult to understand how the model performs its predictive analysis. This can lead to undesired results as the model leads to predictions and suggestions that can be harmful.
- Use – Using predictors and leveraging those decisions is very powerful, and can lead to undesired actions. Much care should be taken there is no violations of privacy or abuse.
- Unsupervised actions – An algorithm may come to a decision (such as an answer on a loan application) but that decision needs to be vetted and okayed by a human.
Much work remains in all these fields. Clearly, Data Analytics is here to stay, with its predictive power, ability to lead to innovation and change in new and productive areas and growing use. But care must be taken to ensure that abuses are minimized. We are more than just numbers.
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