Sorry to flush your toilet, but that does not track emotions. Cut the hype.
Let the people at MIT know that you think their toilet needs to be flushed.
No sense in you whining about it here
RE: “Sorry to flush your toilet, but that does not track emotions. Cut the hype.”
Yes, you’re the expert.
/s
MIT, Microsoft, IBM, and federal agencies are entirely wasting their time developing passive technologies to track behavior.
I mean, why would Obama enact a Behavioral Science Executive Order in Sept 15 2015, that established the creation of Behavioral Health citizen databases?
From the article:
“companies ranging from fledgling startups to giants like Microsoft and IBM have offered software to infer emotional state from facial expressions, spoken words, and written language. And while these tools can be useful to companies looking to understand their customers’ emotional states or even to consumers looking to track their own feelings over time, there’s also plenty of potential for abuse, especially if people’s emotions, or simply their heart rate and breathing, are tracked without their consent or even knowledge.
“I think that any kind of nonconsensual monitoring of people’s metabolism is a pretty serious invasion of privacy,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see security applications for that, maybe even commercial applications, where people aren’t even aware that they’re being monitored, let alone having given permission for it.”
Security officials could treat elevated heart rates as evidence of lying or suspicious behavior, or employers might shy away from hiring job candidates whose vital signs suggest potential health issues, he suggests.
The MIT researchers say their current prototypes are designed so they can only be used consensually: The existing version of the device prompts users to make certain distinctive motions that it can wirelessly detect, in order to effectively authorize it to begin tracking, says Katabi. And, she says, they’ve already developed ways that people can block such a system system from taking measurements where it’s known to be in use, essentially by transmitting interference at similar frequencies.
“You want to block the information this wireless signal has by countering it with another wireless signal,” she says.
But in some cases, like in employer-employee relationships, people might still find themselves coerced into allowing such technology to be used, potentially with little recourse under current laws, says Stanley.
“If an employer informed its employees that it was doing it, and was very up front about it and made it a condition of employment, I’m not sure whether it would be illegal,” he says. “Even so, it’s an extremely intrusive thing to do to your workers.”