Monetize Me? Privacy and the Quantified Self in the Digital Economy

Lifelogging and self-quantifying used to be niche areas for athletes, people with certain medical conditions, and those with the time, money, and motivation to use expensive specialist equipment to monitor themselves. Now the technology for ordinary people to track and analyze many aspects of their lives is becoming both affordable and invisible, requiring little effort or expense to collect. There are many business models based on mining the so-called 'digital exhaust' of people's online activity to provide apparently free services. The fact that so many more people are now able to automatically log so many aspects of their lives (beyond which web pages they visited) is creating opportunities for new business models to actually provide services for the people generating the data. For example, some people may wish to sell their data for cash rather than give it away, some may wish to donate it to worthy scientific causes, such as health research, while others may wish to share data only in a non-identifying aggregated form or perhaps not at all. Lifelogging data can range from relatively benign (such as number of keystrokes typed in a day) to the highly personal (such as the emotional arousal state) and the ways in which the data is shared may be highly nuanced.

This project seeks to understand how the privacy and sharing requirements vary across different demographic groups and to build a sharing and privacy infrastructure specifically designed for lifelogging data.

We propose a number of specific pathways to impact which are based on strong existing stakeholder relationships and ones which we will foster as the project progresses. The project impacts will stem from the range of engagement activities planned, both within the NEMinDE community and project stakeholders. The proposed research will benefit from an advisory board comprising representatives from the QS community, Lifelogging App Development organizations, Consultancy Organizations, Academics and the UK's Information Commissioner. The advisory board will guide the development of the empirical phases and, in particular, will assist the project team in creating short, medium and long term impacts for the work. Activities aimed at creating impact will include:
Academic dissemination (AD): in scholarly and technical venues. This activity will create impacts within the academic community in terms of new thinking about privacy and appropriate NGOs which should eventually influence the adoption of technical standards;
Alumni network and regional contacts (ANRC): the OU's huge alumni network of business practitioners hold regular events where OU research is disseminated. We would take full advantage of this to inform our community about privacy issues within lifelogging and responsible business models for companies handling lifelogging data;
Community engagement (CE): engagement with the specific communities involved through their blogs and fora. This includes not only the QS community but broader consumers of lifelogging devices and online services related to them, including consumers with low levels of health literacy;
Media engagement (ME): trade press, consumer press, broadsheets and BBC proprietary programming. In order to continue to empower the consumer, we would utilise our considerable media contacts and expertise to broadcast the results of the research to a wider audience;
Programme workshops (PW): to discuss relevant privacy research across NEMinDE, to create potential synergies with other funded projects in the programme;
Strategic visioning workshops (SVW): for business participants as part of the project's activities and on an on-going basis afterwards. This would create impacts within the business community and ensure our third deliverable is understood by its respective stakeholder group; and
Stakeholder workshops (SW): to be held at the end of the project to share results. Separate workshops would be held for consumers, including those with low health literacy levels; private sector and regulators/industry bodies. In particular this would help to generate a future research agenda as well as define any intellectual property which may arise from the project.