Give your information one home

This is the slogan for one of the many personal data management systems that are emerging now. This one is called "Personal". Those of you who tested it could tell us if they really understand the strength of "home", as we do in habitele!
Many other services of the same kind are available now, if you want to search for them, you should go to the "personal data ecosytem" pearl in the pearltree habitele (don't know about this bookmarks sharing system?)

A talk on habitele at University of California Irvine

 

An opportunity to discuss the habitele theory framework in the US:
Dominique Boullier will give a talk at University of California Irvine
“From Personal Data Ecosystems and Mobile Phones to Habitele: anthropological theory of wearable digital identities”
A talk by Dominque Boullier
Talk: Friday, May 18, 3:00-4:30 pm, in Donald Bren Hall room 5011

Good attendance and remarkable questions, from which I select these two:
1/ isn't habitele still too much focused on Ego ? This is true when we start to explain it in order ot challenged the doxa in that area of identities. However, the method try to obtain tat from relational activity, including the outside influence. This means that Ego is defined by a major feature which invades Ego and incorpotes it in the sphere of this attribute (e.g. being a member of a tennis club means that when a call arrives from this social workl Ego is summed up as this affiliation and attracted by the influence of "tennis club" (the agency here is tennis club). But we mus be cautious in not developing a new vision of an extended ego when analyzing habitele.
2/ why ot study only the social life of data  and stop trying to connect it to individuals? It could be an approach  very legitimate, and relevant, the one we do at the médialab, studying the topology of the web. However, our goal in the habitele theory is precisely to say at the crossroad between a connected being defined by its personal data ecosystem (and this may become a pure computer sciences issue) and a connected being who still has a body (and a device that is always carried close to it). This is why habitele is both about the technical architecture which is built and the body that inhabits it. It may seem a contradiction, it is only the experiential field of any process of inhabiting.
3/ are the social worlds divided in 5 areas not too restrictive and/or too much affecting the research strategy? They are just here to remind us of a pluralist definition of affiliation, of the various social worlds. We shall let users categorize by themselves, but in order to present them with a general pattern of their own behaviour, we need to aggregate the veru diverse affiliations observed. The preestablished categories must stand for very provisory definitions, to be challenged. Some new one were proposed by Irvine colleagues, quite relevant ones!

Habitele closer and closer to the body...

The habitele theory is based on our ability to create a new skin, a new envelop made of digital identities, which become wearable. Look at this bra and you'll understand why habitele may get very close to "habit" (clothes in french) and how far we've gone to connect our body to the network that gives access to our digital social worlds. Not yet cyborg but close...

Forensics tools used for habitele project

Finally we decided to adopt forensics tools to extract data from the mobile phones. We shall use Oxygen Forensics suite 2012, a very powerful software, supporting 4200 phones models. What was important in our choice is the focus that we need on tracking the activity of the user with his/ her contacts from the phone book. Zokem tracker did not provide any information about that and emphasizes the tracking of apps activity (which is  the most valuable information from a marketing point of view). Of course, we'd like to have both types of data and we'll need to develop social sciences oriented applications to do that. Maybe this is what the CNIL (french regulation board on personal data and computing) will develop with INRIA (major research center in computer sciences). This is what I was told during an recent audition I had with this organization about personal data, that are not personal but relational in habitele's framework.

A social bookmarking system Pearltrees about habitele

We created a Pearl on pearltrees about habitele. This is the best way to share our documentation ressources and to let everybody contribute on this topic. You can join it here

Mobile communications and spatial distribution

Some papers were recently published demonstrating that the spatial distribution of mobile communications reflects the administrative borders (in Great Britain, for land lines, in Belgium, and in France). The research papers were based on the processing of millions of mobile communications using the zip code of the subscription bill or the most frequent local antenna used during the night. People seem to be amazed by the results and the prevalence of traditional spatial distribution, which means that they thought mobile phones were addressing an issue of mobility: we challenged that from the very beginning in the habitele project and these results confirm our choices. Mobile phones are more personal and portable than mobile. The mobility that is provided as a new paradigm is a social one by switching between social worlds we belong to.
The belgian study
http://www.briobrussel.be/assets/andere%20publicaties/en_129_brus42en.pdf
The french study
http://www.paristechreview.com/2011/11/15/telephone-portable-cartes/
The british study (from MIT Carlo Ratti's team, based on land lines)
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0014248

Privacy on Facebook

Interesting to watch this dynamic display of the privacy features on Facebook. Open Privacy for all? Did YOU decide that?