Forget Facebook — your body emits data that could be used

Prorootect

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Forget Facebook — your body emits data that could be used to read your emotions, check your health, and track aggression

uk.businessinsider.com: Forget Facebook — your body emits data that could be used to read your emotions, check your health, and track aggression

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Bret Hartman/TED

Forget Facebook's data-sharing. New technologies could soon make it possible for companies and institutions to passively track your emotions and health.
  • Poppy Crum, the chief scientist at Dolby Labs, discussed these technologies during a talk at the annual TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
  • "Imagine a high-school counselor realizing that outwardly cheery student is having a hard time...or the authorities knowing the difference between a mental health crisis and another kind of aggression," she said.

Even if you opt out of Facebook and all it's data-sharing tendencies, avoid using a smartphone, and generally stay off the internet, you're still emitting data every second of every day. As Poppy Crum, the chief scientist at Dolby Labs, demonstrated during a talk at the annual TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada, new technologies could soon make it possible for companies and institutions to track your emotions and health using this data.

While onstage, Crum showed the audience a frightening video. She then offered up a data visualization showing the carbon dioxide exhaled by people in the theater while the video played.

Crum had, it turned out, been tracking the audience's carbon dioxide emissions. "You can see where some of us jumped as a deep red cloud. It's our collective suspense creating a spike in CO2," she said.

This is the kind of passive data collection technology, according to Crum, that could one day be used to reveal our inner lives to teachers, doctors, and of course, corporations.

"Imagine a high-school counselor realizing that outwardly cheery student is having a hard time...or the authorities knowing the difference between a mental health crisis and another kind of aggression," she said.

Crum, a neurophysiologist by training, does related research in her day job. At Dolby, she studies how people watch movies using EEG caps, pulse oximeters, trackers that measure heart rate and sweat response, and thermal imaging cameras. The idea, according to The Verge, is to answer a variety of questions that could be used to change the ways films and TV shows are made, including what kinds of scenes cause people to sweat, fall asleep, or get nervous.

Crum believes this kind of technology could eventually be pervasive in our everyday lives. And while some might see it as an invasion of privacy, she thinks it will be used for good — if we let it.

When TED first approached her about doing a talk, Crum said she wanted to focus on something that isn't talked about enough: how it's now possible to objectify our internal states, making seemingly subjective unknowns (like emotion) quantifiable.

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Bret Hartman/TED

"Today’s talk was about sensors in the world that can pick things up without our agency. There are so many opportunities right now for tech to know these things about us, and it’s not always bad," she told Business Insider after she got offstage.

In practice, she says, this could mean allowing healthcare providers access to speech data that could detect diseases (speech changes can be a sign of Alzheimer's, for example) or letting teachers have access to information about how students are reacting to certain lessons.

Crum also brought up an example from her work life. "I almost never take phone meetings that don’t involve video. In a highly male workplace, it’s easy for females to be construed as aggressive and not assertive on the phone." It could be useful, she suggested, for passive data-tracking technology to pick up emotions during these types of meetings so that nothing is misconstrued.

"It’s not that we [need to be] sharing everything, but how do you make sure people have understood you, that they've been able to take away the message you’re trying to share?" she said.

The privacy implications for this kind of data-tracking are enormous. Crum is an advocate for regulation — and getting out ahead of data-tracking technologies before they become pervasive.

"Your devices will know more about you than you will," she said. "I believe we need to think about how [the technology] could be used.
 
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Prorootect

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Nov 5, 2011
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Spy cameras could soon know what we’re thinking and feeling simply by scanning our BODIES – and there may be no way to opt-out
April 13, 2018 Author GOV'T SLAVES
GOVTSLAVES.INFO – Everything You've Been Taught Is a LIE!: Spy cameras could soon know what we’re thinking and feeling simply by scanning our BODIES – and there may be no way to opt-out – GOVTSLAVES.INFO

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The data we share with companies online has become a hot-button issue, but new technologies could soon be scanning us as we go about our day.
That’s the claim made by a neuroscientist, who believes that devices in the real world will start gathering unprecedented levels of information about us.

Our bodies give off various signals that can be scanned and analysed by advanced computer systems, revealing everything from our current mood to our overall health.
In a similar way to wearable gadgets already available, future devices could be set up throughout public spaces to harvest this valuable bio-data.

Because they are part of our surrounding environment there will be no way for us to opt out or ditch the technology and new regulations will be needed, she warns.
The claims were made during a presentation given by Dolby Labs’ chief scientist Poppy Crum, who has spent the past few years studying people’s reactions as they watch films, at the Ted 2018 conference in Vancouver.
Using thermal imaging cameras, ‘mind-reading’ electroencephalogram (EEG) caps, heart rate monitors and skin response sensors, she can watch how volunteer’s bodies and minds respond to what they watch on screen.
And its a small step to imagine these techniques making the move to the real world in the near future.
 
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Daviworld

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Feb 19, 2018
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Honestly, I thought this tech might of been abused by intelligence agencies for a few year's, since we always had the capability. However, glad to see it's not out yet, but sadden and disgusted because I know this will be abused and the era of the thought police will arrive. Where we all have to wear aluminium foil over our head's or pay a price for some device that can block our signals lol = corporate profit
 
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Danielx64

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Mar 24, 2017
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I am gonna watch that video by Poppy Crum when I get home :) It will be very interesting.
 

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