Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Its been a long time since I got my sizing kit but I was told Size 12 was completely sold out for months.
However today I got the email I’ve been waiting for… My Motiv ring is on its way with a tracking link.
Expect to see some details about it once I have it on my finger
Get inspiration and ideas from hundreds of self-tracking projects documented in our community archive, searchable by tools and topics.
Its great to see all of the quantified self videos, presentations and show and tells in one place. Its quite an archive of media and worth browsing through. I had the joy of seeing some of these live at the Quantified Self conference’s.
Here’s some of my favourite ones.
Mark Wislon notices that his inbox correlates directly with his stress level. After passively tracking this for three years, he decides to actively shift how he sees his inbox account and learns how he’s controlled (and been controlled by) this stream of angst. He also discovers a very important life lesson: he’s addicted to email.
Fabio Ricardo dos Santos is gregarious and likes to be around people. A lot of people. But he had a nagging sense that something was out of balance. To better understand why, he began to track his relationships and interactions. He soon found that out of the people that he knows, only about 14% are what he considered to be important relationships and that they made up 34% of his interactions. He felt that this number was too low and it spurred him to spend more time with that important 14%. But he didn’t just track his time with people and the number of interactions. He expanded his system to include the quality of his relationships and interactions. He found that this made him focus on face-to-face interactions and video chats over emails and texts.
Dana Greenfield’s mom was a surgeon, professor, researcher, entrepreneur, blogger, tennis player, and a mentor to many medical students. Unexpectedly, she passed away in February, 2014. To help her process her mother’s death, Dana began tracking every time she thought of her mother by writing down what triggered the memory, the mood it inspired, etc. Watch Dana’s talk as she shares her experiences of using self-tracking to better understand her own grief and the role her mother continues to play in her life.
Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist, reflects on some observations of what self-trackers actually do when they make sense of data. Dawn’s observations led her to ask: what tools might support more diverse ways of working with data? This short talk describes what she’s learned while engaging and building tools for the QS community.
Sebastien Le Tuan is a recovering “late-oholic.” He is typically always late to friends and family events. One day he had a conversation with his dad that made him realize what effects his tardiness has on his personal and professional life. In this talk, Sebastien describes how he started tracking his punctuality and what he has learned from the process.
Laurie Frick is a visual artist that make work, objects, and installations that relate to brain rhythm. In the video, she presents her amazing work on daily activity charts and sleep charts translated to art. She measured her nightly sleep for over 3 years using a ZEO eeg headband and has almost 1000 nights of sleep data.
Shelly Jang used GMvault to look through 5 years of Google Chat logs to hunt for signals that she loves only her husband. She looked at whom she messages, the time of a day, and the words she uses. She was able to extract meanings from innocuous metrics like “delay in response” to show whether her or her future husband were “playing games” at the beginning of the relationship. In the talk, she shares what she learned from her project.
When Kitty stumbled upon her grandmother’s diaries and started to explore the daily entries, she was struck by similarities with her own life and habits. Kitty is a modern-day lifelogger. She tracks places, events, mood – a variety of different personal data streams. Reading the diaries, Kitty saw that her grandmother used her daily entries as logs – tracking the details of where she went, what she ate, even the boys she kissed. In this talk, Kitty shares what she discovered, and the lessons she learned.
Rob Shields has been wearing a camera phone around his neck that takes photos every minute. He has been doing this since August of last year. In this video, one year later, he talks about what has changed, what’s new, the things that have been working, and some of the stuff that haven’t been working. He also shares some data from his experiment.
Valarie moved to San Francisco when she was 29 and she was not prepared for the city life. She was really freaked out by the trash on the streets, by the way the taxi drivers drove, and how expensive everything was. But the thing that freaked her out the most was street harassment. Street harassment is any action or comment between strangers in public places that is disrespectful, unwelcome, threatening, or harassing and is motivated by gender or sexual orientation. She was surprised with how many times she was harassed while walking around. To better understand what was going on she started tracking these instance.
Mark Krynsky started a blog about six years ago. On his blog, he wrote about live streaming and impetus and how he was trying to aggregate social data into a single timeline. The blog evolved over time, and it wasn’t just about social data–it was also about life blogging. Since then, he learned about Quantified Self and started thinking about the future of his data, what’s going to happen after he dies? In this talk, Mark discusses digital preservation and how he created an action plan for his digital data after his death.
Quantified Self organizer and cognitive science researcher, Daniel Gartenberg, is interested in sleep and his passion is this idea of not just tracking sleep but actually being able to improve sleep. He also makes sleep apps. He started tracking his sleep after his business partner contacted him on a recent scientific finding, where basically one could enhance deep sleep auditory stimulation that replicates the frequency of one’s own brainwaves when in deep sleep. In this talk, he shares his tips on tracking and improving his sleep.
After years of collecting Quantified Self data, Aaron Parecki began moving more of his data onto his personal website rather than letting it sit in someone else’s cloud. This insures that his data will stick around even after apps and devices go away.
Of course I would say not exactly, especially in the face of the IBM’s Diversity in Faces project which I wrote about here and got a initial reply here. But its a interesting question which prompts the post, scientists like me are studying your tweets are you ok with that?
“Public” is the magic word when it comes to research ethics. “But the data is already public.” That was the response from Harvard researchers in 2008, when they released a data set of college students’ Facebook profiles, and from Danish researchers in 2016, when they released a data set scraped from OKCupid. The regulatory bodies that oversee research ethics (like institutional review boards at U.S. universities) usually don’t consider “public” data to be under their purview. Many researchers see these review boards as the arbiters of what’s ethical; if it’s not something that the boards care about, then it can’t be unethical, right?
Whether the data is public or not is important for ethical decision-making — in fact, it’s necessary.
There is a old-school hacker thing, that anything public is public and if you don’t want it public don’t put it online. But to be fair that idealistic view before the likes of cloud services broke the notion badly.
However there is a question for research which upholds its self above the likes of commercial companies. I know being in the research field myself, research and the ethics boards are really strict with this all. To be fair I’m glad of this because I’ve seen too many bad uses of public data including semi-public (dating site data for example) and heck private data!
As researchers, we have a responsibility to acknowledge that factors like the type of data, the creator of that data, and our intended use for the data are important when it comes to using public information. These factors must inform the decisions we make about whether and how to collect data and to report findings. I hope the work that my collaborators and I are doing will help to inform best practices, so that, in the end, we can continue to contribute great science to the world while also respecting the people who share their data with us every day.
Absolutely!
Now can some tell IBM this too?
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Dear Ian,Thank you for your email.The Diversity in Faces (DiF) project, referenced in your request below, is a non-commercial, research initiative. The DiF dataset includes a list of URLs (but not the images themselves), linking to publicly available images on Flickr under certain creative commons licenses, along with associated annotations. We have taken great care to ensure that the DiF dataset does not include Flickr IDs or any other Flickr identifiers of individuals.In order to respond to your request, we will need to locate the URLs in the DiF dataset that are linked to your Flickr ID (if any). To do this, we will need your Flickr ID, along with your express consent to use it for the sole purpose of locating such URLs and responding to your request. Separately, if you would like us to, we can remove any URLs of images linked to your Flickr ID from the DiF dataset. Please confirm this by reply.After conducting our search, we will delete your Flickr ID from our records, and if you so request, we will also remove any URLs and associated annotations from the DiF dataset connected to your Flickr ID. We will confirm when this process has been completed.With respect to your request to access your personal data processed by IBM outside the DiF project, you will be contacted separately by the IBM Data Subject Rights Operations Team (Email at ibm.com) to proceed with your request.Let us know if you have any questions or how we can further assist you with your request.IBM Research DiF Team
We owe a lot to Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the 30th Anniversary of the web.
Tim Berners-Lee helped invent the world wide web 30 years ago. And he has consistently pointed out that the original dream that gave rise to it is under threat.
It is exactly 30 years since Sir Tim submitted a paper to his colleagues at CERN, suggesting a way of sharing data across networks, under the title “Information Management: A Proposal”. The humble title belies the importance of what was contained inside, which included a complete sketch for the networked information system that would on to become the internet we know today.
But its really important to think about the next 30 years.
Surveillance capitalism and governmental/state control are hot topics which very much threaten the fabric of the web. But so does our use of the web and the way we treat each other.
I had a really good 10min talk with Sir Tim Berners-Lee during the last Mozilla Festival, while talking about Solid, Databox and data trust. What got me as we talked, was ultimately we were talking about power and where it lies. Power in the hands of governments (Chinese model) , corporations (American model) or people? (could be the European model?)
I think remembering their are humans, not eyeballs, not lefties/rightwingers, etc is so important. Lets celebrate the people of the web!
https://twitter.com/whynotadoc/status/1105400124447039489
We apologize for this breach and the fact that your email address might have been part of it. The email addresses were included in the breach along with a hashed password – not the actual password (which has been expired and can no longer be used to access the account on MyHeritage). Other than this, there has not been a violation of the data. See our official statement here and an updated statement here.Please be advised that this incident does not affect the privacy of any sensitive information you have on your online family site, including DNA information and family trees. Only hashed versions of passwords were stolen, which means they cannot be used to log in to your private account on MyHeritage.
There has been no evidence that the stolen information was ever used by the perpetrators. Since Oct 26, 2017 (the date of the breach) and the present we have not seen any activity indicating that any MyHeritage accounts had been compromised.
The privacy and the security of your information is our highest priority and we continually assess our procedures and policies and seek the best methods to secure information. The work on adding two-factor authentication to MyHeritage is completed and you can read the full explanation about this feature here.
In addition to that, I have carried out a search within our system, and I was not able to locate an account using your email address: **********************************
If you had an account using this email address and the account was deleted, we currently do not retain any information from your registered account and therefore, I cannot provide you with any information regarding it as it no longer exists.However, if you registered to MyHeritage using another email address, please let me know with which so I will be able to locate it. In addition to that, as an extra security measure, if you still have access to this email address would you please be so kind to send us an email using that address?
If you run into any further issues, by all means, please don’t hesitate to reply. I’m here for you.
MyHeritage Support team
Maybe I deleted my account too soon, unfortunately giving them a easy out. I should have done the GDPR request then deleted my account afterwards! I was looking forward seeing proof the account was a shadow profile
I received a email from have have I been pwned that my email address and password had been exposed in breach from My Heritage. Most breaches are somewhat worry-some but as I don’t use the same passwords because I have a password manager with lengthy random passwords; its less of a problem.
What was shocking about the myheritage breach for me, was that I have never logged in to or used myheritage ever. If I had an account, I would have an entry in my password manager. To confirm this I have requested my data via GDPR.
I believe a member of my large family entered my email address and then added details about me into myheritage, therefore creating a shadow profile for me to log into. It makes sense, as others in the family can fill in details they have for me. So the password which was leaked isn’t even set by me, but rather auto generated by myhertiage? The only way I could get access to the account was via a password reset. Once in I deleted my account straight away, but I thought about it some more.
The leaked/breached password and login would give the buyer access to any information my family member entered including date of birth, relationships with other members of the family, etc.
If I’m right this is deeply troubling and a worrying precedent!
Tony tweeted me about this thrill machine which uses body data to influence how the ride operates. The link comes from Mashable and I was able to trace it back to the original
“…while building this attraction I also wanted to change the usual one-sided relation – a situation where the body is overwhelmed by physical impressions but the machine itself remains indifferent, inattentive for what the body goes through. Neurotransmitter 3000 should therefore be more intimate, more reciprocal. That’s why I’ve developed a system to control the machine with biometric data. Using sensors, attached to the body of the passenger – measuring his heart rate, muscle tension, body temperature and orientation and gravity – the data is translated into variations in motion. And so, man and machine intensify their bond. They re-meet in a shared interspace, where human responsiveness becomes the input for a bionic conversation.”
https://danieldebruin.com/neurotransmitter-3000
Its a good idea but unfortunately couldn’t work on a rollercoasters, which is my thing. Or could it? For example everyones hand up in the air means what? The ride goes faster? How on earth does work? How meaningful would this be if you could actually do this?
Its one of the research questions we attempted to explore in the living room of the future. How can you combine different peoples personal data to construct a experience which is meaningful and not simply a medium of it all.
These global changes don’t seem meaningful or so useful? Maybe its about the micro changes like mentioned previous.
Of course others have been working around this type of things too.
Its been a long haul but finally Flickr is beyond use for me. I briefly tried Flickr pro for a while but theres so many other options now. Its a shame but Flickr went through a lot of trouble at the end but was saved from Yahoo craziness by snugmug. But even looking at the pro account prices, I decided that after…
It was time to leave Flickr and just let it start deleting my photos, which I mainly had backed up in multiple places anyway.
I was quite impressed with Flickr’s data portability option, for example the uploaded files are exactly the same. But it would have been great if they embedded the tags into the original EXIF data. However it seems they kept the tags in account data. So with some work, it would be possible to pull the whole lot together again? I’m actually surprised no ones already done this?
So many people are doing the Facebook 10 year challenge and I’m so happy to see the Wired’s piece asking the question of what Facebook could be doing with the photos.
Of course some people think its all blown out of proportion, cue Jeff Jarvis on Twit recently. As Leo says at the end of the clip, Facebook and others will lie and claim one thing, but from past experience we have caught them lying.
I had planned a series of blog posts about different gender items I’ve seen in blog posts, the news , etc but never got the time. Instead I kept adding them to wallabag and tagging them to blog.
So think of this blog post as a series of micoblog with little comments after each link.
This one sums up so many things I hear and can’t stand. Shes right, how fragile is masculinity that eating a banana in a certain way can cause idiots to worry. Its frankly so stupid I can’t bring myself to say anything more that what I’ve said before.
We can’t want gender equality and still expect guys to pay for the first date and Viewpoint: ‘Why most men should pay on first dates’
Dare I say anything more…? To be fair its been a long time since I mentioned who pays on the first date. But to be fair there is arguments and tensions, which is why it keeps coming up. For example if you take the massive gender pay gap and then exercise it in who pays for the bill. Most heterosexual dates would have the man paying 20-33% more for the bill. This was noted to me and I pointed out the minority pay gap is pretty awful too making things even more tricky on a first date.
How thrillers offer an antidote to toxic masculinity and Flirting and you’ll be called a rapist? Oh please grow up, Superman
Lessons in how to be a good man? Maybe? Not so sure as the old-fashioned view from Superman actor Henry Cavill says it all. Generally the men in thrillers I’ve seen, might be better than the toxic masculinity you see now but not exactly enlighten to feminism.
What Do Men Think It Means To Be A Man?
So this is very interesting research. I originally heard the love, sex and money issue a while ago, but didn’t dig into the survey till recently.
When I read,
Pop culture was a source of inspiration for an understanding of manhood for younger men (42 percent of those age 18 to 34), while only 17 percent of men 35 to 64 and 12 percent of men 65 and over said the same.
My instant thought was something of a worry, as I’m not seeing the best examples in pop culture (although I have to admit I don’t spend much time in pop culture so maybe I’m automatically biased).
The society pressure and daily concerns was another key one, which I’d love to have similar results from a decade ago and a decade before that.
The question How would you say it’s an advantage to be a man at your work right now? Blew my mind…
59% of men surveyed didn’t think Men are taken more seriously, Men make more money, Men have more choice, Men have more professional development opportunities, Men generally have more support from their managers, Men are explicitly praised more often?
This is delusion at its worst, even Even with the #metoo movement making this super clear. But it is consistent with a conversation I had in my barbars a while ago to be fair, when I mentioned going to see the Guilty Feminist live recording in Liverpool.
All of the survey data is on Github, which feels like could be more data to add to the Modern Romance reddit data. Some of this may appear in my book one day.
Quite enjoyed Guardian’s piece about the raff of home iot devices coming to the home these holidays.
If you’ve so far withstood the temptation to install a smart speaker in your home, worried about the potential privacy pitfalls and a bit embarrassed about the notion of chatting aimlessly to an inanimate object, brace yourselves. This Christmas, the world’s biggest tech giants, including Amazon, Google and Facebook, are making another bid for your living room, announcing a range of new devices that resemble tablets you can talk to.
It was a real welcome surprise to read/hear Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino too. Her new book Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life is pretty much on the money.
“It’s very clear what they’re trying to do: sell you more stuff through third-party use of your own information,”
The fear about whether or not such devices are actually always on causes some users to relegate their smart speakers to corridors. “Think about where in the home you want to use these things, particularly if you think they might be listening all the time,”
I had the joy of capturing some of Alexandra’s early thoughts while putting together the ethics of personal data video interviews back in 2015.
I think the only thing missing from the article is a link to Mozilla’s buyers guide, which charts in a friendly consumer fashion whats actually going on underneath the surface of the iot devices we may get over the holiday period.
The weekend of the 22-23rd September 2018, the living room of the future will be at the London Design Festival’s Digital weekender at the V&A Museum.
Tickets are still available but there is a waiting list for certain times. Of course if there is space we will add you to the audience, but we do have a physical limit on each showing.
Come and visit us and give your views… See you there!
Its over 14 years since the dataportability project was founded by a bunch of well meaning people including myself. It was a challenging time with vendor lock, walled gardens and social guilt trips; to be honest little changed till very recently with GDPR.
Data export was good but user controlled data transfer is something special and one of the dreams of the data portability project. Service to service; not because there was a special agreement setup between the services but because you choose to move of your own freewill; makes so much sense.
This why I was kind of sceptical of the Google data transfer project. But on deeper look its pretty good.
In 2007, a small group of engineers in our Chicago office formed the Data Liberation Front, a team that believed consumers should have better tools to put their data where they want, when they want, and even move it to a different service. This idea, called “data portability,” gives people greater control of their information, and pushes us to develop great products because we know they can pack up and leave at any time.
In 2011, we launched Takeout, a new way for Google users to download or transfer a copy of the data they store or create in a variety of industry-standard formats. Since then, we’ve continued to invest in Takeout—we now call it Download Your Data—and today, our users can download a machine-readable copy of the data they have stored in 50+ Google products, with more on the way.
Now, we’re taking our commitment to portability a step further. In tandem with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook we’re announcing the Data Transfer Project, an open source initiative dedicated to developing tools that will enable consumers to transfer their data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it. Download Your Data users can already do this; they can transfer their information directly to their Dropbox, Box, MS OneDrive, and Google Drive accounts today. With this project, the development of which we mentioned in our blog post about preparations for the GDPR, we’re looking forward to working with companies across the industry to bring this type of functionality to individuals across the web.
All sounds great and the code is open source on Github for anyone to try out. The paper is worth reading too.
However! The devil is in the data or rather the lack of it. As the EFF point out theres no tracking data exchange, the real crown jewels. The transfer tool is good but if the services don’t even share the data, then whats the point?
With GDPR I send out emails to OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, Tinder and others. So far I’ve only gotten responses from POF and OkCupid. Which means Tinder and others have about a day or so to get back to me with everything before I can start to throw down some fire.
Before I headed on holiday, I got a message from POF then OKcupid a day later, saying they need the request from the email which is on the account. Fair enough, so I forwarded each email to that email address and replied all to myself and to them but from that email account address.
A few days later I got emails, first from POF and then OKCupid.
You have recently requested a copy of your PlentyofFish (“POF”) personal data, and we’re happy to report that we have now verified your identity.
We are attaching a copy of your personal data contained in or associated with your POF account. The password to access the personal data will be sent in a separate email.
By downloading this data, you consent to the extraction of your data from POF, and assume all risk and liability for such downloaded data. We encourage you to keep it secure and take precautions when storing or sharing it.
The information contained in this archive may vary depending on the way you have used POF. In general, this information includes content and photos you have provided us, whether directly or through your social media accounts, messages you have sent and other data you would expect to see from a social media service like POF.
Please note that there is some information we cannot release to you including information that would likely reveal personal information about other users. Those notably include messages you received on POF, which are not provided out of concern for the privacy of the senders.
Sincerely,
POF Privacy Team
Then similar from OKcupid, which makes sense being the same company really.
Dear Mr. Forrester:
You have recently requested a copy of your OkCupid personal data, and we’re happy to report that we have now verified your identity.
We are attaching a copy of your personal data contained in or associated with your OkCupid account. The password to access the personal data will be sent in a separate email.
By downloading this data, you consent to the extraction of your data from OkCupid, and assume all risk and liability for such downloaded data. We encourage you to keep it secure and take precautions when storing or sharing it.
The information contained in this archive may vary depending on the way you have used OkCupid. In general, this information includes content and photos you have provided us, whether directly or through your social media accounts, messages you have sent and other data you would expect to see from a social media service like OkCupid.
Please note that there is some information we cannot release to you including information that would likely reveal personal information about other users. Those notably include messages you received on OkCupid, which are not provided out of concern for the privacy of the senders.
Sincerely,
OkCupid Privacy Team
So on my train journey from Stockholm to Copenhagen, I had a look inside the Zip files shared with me. Quite different, I’d be interesting to see what others will do.
As you can see quite different, interestingly no photos in the OKCupid data dump, even the ones I shared as part of my profile. In POF the PDF is a copy of the Json file, which is silly really.
So the Json files are the most interesting parts…
Plenty of Fish
.POF don’t have much interesting data, basically a copy of my profile data in Json including Firstvisit, FirstvisitA, etc to FirstvisitE complete with my ip address. I also can confirm I started my profile on 2012-01-25.
Then there is my BasicSearchData and AdvancedSearchData which includes the usual stuff and when I LastSearch ‘ed and from which IP address.
Nothing else… no messages
OkCupid
OkCupid has a ton more useful information in its Json. Some interesting parts; I have logged into OKCupid a total of 24157 times! My status is Active? My job is Technology? The geolocation_history is pretty spot on and the login_history goes from July 2007 to current year, complete with IP and time.
The messages is really interesting! They decided to share one of the messages, so only the ones you send rather what you received. As the messages are not like emails, you don’t get the quoted reply, just the sent message. Each item includes who from (me) and time/date. There are some which are obviously a instant massager conversation which look odd reading them now. In those ones, theres also fields for peer, peer_joined, time and type. Its also clear where changes have happened for example when you use to be able to add some formatting to the message and you use to have subject lines.
Some which stick out include, Allergic to smoking?, insomnia, ENTP and where next, The Future somewhat answered, So lazy you’ve only done 40 something questions, Dyslexia is an advantage, But would you lie in return? No bad jokes, gotland and further a field, Ok obvious question, etc.
Next comes the photos (My photos, no one elses)
"caption": "OkCupid's removal of visitors is so transparent, I don't know why they bothered to lie to us all?", "photo": "https://k1.okccdn.com/php/load_okc_image.php/images/6623162030294614734", "status": "Album Picture Active", "uploaded": "2017-08-08 19:16:20"
Of course the images are publicly available via the url, so I could pull them all down with a quick wget/curl. Not sure what to make about this idea of making them public. Security through obscurity anyone?
Now the images strings seems to be random but don’t think this is a good idea at all! Wondering how it sits with GDPR too, also wondering if they will remove them after a period of time. Hence if the image a above is broken, then you know what happened.
Then we are on to the purchases section. It details when I once tried A-list subscription and when I cancelled it. How I paid (paypal), how much, address, date, etc… Its funny reading about when I cancelled it…
"comments": "userid = 7367007913453081320 was downgraded to amateur", "transaction": "lost subscription",
The big question I always had was the question data. Don’t worry they are all there! For example here’s just one of mine.
{
"answer_choices": {
"1": "Yes",
"2": "No"
},
"prompt": "Are you racist?",
"question_id": 7847,
"user_acceptable_answers": [
"No"
],
"user_answer": "No",
"user_answered_publicly": "no",
"user_importance": "mandatory"
},
After all those questions, theres a bunch of stuff about user_devices I’ve used to log into OkCupid over the years going right back. Stuff about preferences for searches, etc.
Going to need some time to digest everything but the OKCupid data dump is full of interesting things. I might convert the lot to XML just to make it easier for me to over view.