Fgraham1’s Blog

On The Record, All the Time
Researchers digitally capture the daily flow of life.
The artical tells us about the first day Scott Carlson came home with a digital audio recorder hanging around my neck, along with a sign that said “Warning: This conversation may be recorded,” my wife shook her head in a way that conveyed deep embarrassment. One woman saw my sign and hushed her friends: “Look, he’s recording.” “You’re recording your life all the time?” people said. Many of them are documenting all their conversations, movements, ideas, and correspondence through audio recorders, digital cameras, GPS trackers, pedometers, brain scanners, and other gadgets. Jim Gemmell, who leads lifelogging projects for Microsoft Research, says that we will one day glean information from our own lives the same way we now get information from Google.
Consider that the latest cellphones are equipped to record video and track your location. A laboratory at Queen’s University at Kingston, in Ontario, is working on a camera that starts recording when its wearer makes eye contact with another person — one of many lifelogging projects in academe. What can lifelogging do for us? I went to an electronics store and bought a digital voice recorder for $100. Mr. Bush imagined scientists wearing little cameras on their heads to record lab work. In the 1990s, MIT’s Media Lab began dabbling in lifelogging through wearable computers, under the direction of Mr. Pentland and other researchers. Steve Mann, an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of Toronto who was once Mr. Pentland’s student, wrote about his experiences wearing various recording devices in his book Cyborg. In the early 2000s, the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency embarked on lifelogging research of its own. Around the same time, Microsoft Research took up lifelogging with a project called MyLifeBits, which is devoted to figuring out how to store vast amounts of lifelogged information and how a lifelogger might find important kernels in a pile of chaff. So far, he has amassed some 160 gigabytes of data, more than the hard-drive space on most people’s computers.
Mr. Gemmell says he has found that a lifelogger can home in on a recorded event — a conversation about a new idea with a colleague at a conference, for example — by associating it with other memories. You could use GPS records, weather data, and your calendar entries to triangulate and the find the digitized “memory.”
Doctors already record physiological data, like heart rhythms, through mobile devices, but researchers imagine that lifelogging tools could give physicians an even clearer picture of the factors influencing a person’s health. Lifelogging itself could even be a form of therapy.
A day recorded by a SenseCam looks like a stop-action film.
Other researchers, like Alan F. Smeaton, are trying to find automated ways to navigate lifelogging data. Along the way, his researchers have recorded the significant and the banal. Audio lifelogging is socially taboo, legally treacherous, and, occasionally, emotionally jarring.
Daniel P.W. Ellis, associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, knows this from having recorded his daily life for almost two years. About half the people he met were uneasy or annoyed when he told them he was recording them. “Some people there obviously felt that it fell within their scope.”
Lately he has become interested in keeping the recorded conversations private. That night he realized he had recorded the fight, which is somewhere in that pile of discs. “I never went back to listen to it, but there exists that recording of me being an asshole,” he says. Mr. Ellis and his wife rushed their son to the hospital, and as Mr. Ellis was talking with the doctors about his son’s condition, he realized that he was recording the whole event.
Emilio W. Cividanes, a lawyer in Washington who specializes in wiretapping issues, told me that I needed to consider wiretapping and eavesdropping laws when it came to recording my life. In most states, you need the consent of at least one party when recording conversations, but in 12 states, including Maryland, where I live, you need the consent of both parties.
(Lifelogging in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Oregon would be risky, as those states have both strict laws for consent and no allowances for recording in public, he says.) I decided to play it safe and hang a sign around my neck announcing my recording to the world.
“So if I told you my name” — and he told me his name and some information about himself — “you would record all of that?”
Journalists are accustomed to the conventions of going off the record, even in private life.
The society is free of crime, but even innocent people face punishment if they don’t have alibis.
“People lying to each other, manipulating each other. Lifelogging researchers are well aware that their work treads philosophically, socially, and legally treacherous territory, and they take steps to protect their data. Leana Golubchik, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, has raised a nightmare scenario among lifeloggers in which authorities can subpoena details about private lives from lifelogging archives. Perhaps lifeloggers could program their gadgets to record only those people who grant permission, and the machines could scramble everything else. At the same time, the researchers are interested in how lifelogging might change society in positive ways.
Jane Greenberg, an associate professor of information and library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is studying the ways that undergraduates use lifelogging tools to enhance their learning in a biology course. My father asked my grandfather if he liked to work. In his book Mystic Chords of Memory, Michael Kammen, a historian at Cornell University, points out that people are in a constant process of forgetting, recasting, and re-remembering their histories to reflect and reinforce their values and beliefs.
Even if lifelogging catches on — and Ms. Lepore is skeptical — she wonders whether the records would be of any use to historians. The recorder had captured funny stories and moments that were worth saving. I wondered whether my kids would want a record of a day in the life of their father when they got older.
It was one of the few times I regretted not wearing the recorder more often.
Unless an audio-scanning program for lifeloggers hits retail shelves soon, that project could take weeks. For now, I’ll hold these memories close.

Question 1: Would you want to record your life all the time?

Question 2: What are the legal risks of lifelogging?