From Slate
There’s No Such Thing as Innocuous Personal Data
Why you should keep your heart rate, sleep patterns, and other seemingly boring info to yourself.
By Elizabeth Weingarten
It’s 2020, and a couple is on a date. As they sip cocktails and banter, each is dying to sneak a peek at the other’s wearable device to answer a very sensitive question.
What’s his or her heart rate variability?
That’s because heart rate variability, which is the measurement of the time in between heartbeats, can also be an indicator of female sexual dysfunction and male sexual dysfunction....
But if the connection is confirmed in the future, perhaps it could be cross-indexed, introduced into algorithms, and used, in conjunction with other data, to profile or convict individuals, suggests John Chuang, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information and the director of its BioSense lab. (Biosensing technology uses digital data to learn about living systems like people.) “It’s something we can’t anticipate—these new classes of data we assume are innocuous that turn out not to be,” says Chuang.
And in the absence of research linking heart rate to particular health or behavioral outcomes, we tend to have our own entrenched social interpretations of what a faster heart rate actually means—that someone is lying, or nervous, or interested. Berkeley researchers have found that even those assumed associations could have complicated implications for apps that allow users to share heart rate information with friends or employers. In one recent study currently undergoing peer review, when participants in a trust game observed that their partners had an elevated heart rate, they were less likely to cooperate with them and more likely to attribute some kind of negative mood to that person. In another study scheduled to be published soon, participants were asked to imagine a scenario: They were about to meet an acquaintance to talk about a legal dispute, and the acquaintance texted that he or she was running late. Alongside the text, that person’s heart rate appeared. If the heart rate was normal, many study participants felt it should have been elevated to show that their acquaintance cared about being late. The authors warn of the “potential danger” of apps that could encourage heart rate sharers to make the wrong associations between their signals and behavior. One app, Cardiogram, is already posing the question: “What’s your heart telling you?”
...Yet there’s another side to this future. The way you walk can be as unique as your fingerprint; a couple of studies show that gait can help verify the identity of smartphone users. And gait can also predict whether someone is at risk for dementia. Seemingly useless pieces of data may let experts deduce or predict certain behaviors or conditions now, but the big insights will come in the next few years, when companies and consumers are able to view a tapestry of different individual data points and contrast them with data across the entire population. That’s when, according to a recent report from Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, we’ll be able to “gain deep insight into human emotional experiences.”...