RISE Lab

I recently published a post about the blurry boundaries between standard system services and Google Maps on Android. I argued that these boundaries made it hard to talk about consent and competition around location services. However, the branching factor for the data sharing made the argument complex and hard to follow. Even as I was writing that post, in the train on the way into Berkeley, I started getting notifications from the Google app about the weather at my location. The Google app (aka Google Now) is a virtual assistant that is intended to provide context-sensitive helpful information to users. It is closed source, pre-installed, and it cannot be uninstalled or disabled. And I had already turned off all its…

There has been a lot of interest in data collected about users by Facebook recently. Journalists have been shocked when they downloaded the data that Facebook has on them. Most of this concern has been focused around data collected through explicit user interaction such as web browsing, or clicking on “Like” and “Share” buttons. Background data collection, which occurs without any explicit user intervention, is arguably creepier, because it collects data whether or not you interact with the service. For example, Facebook has been criticized for logging texts and phone calls in the background. Facebook argues that users consented to sharing the data, although many users are still skeptical about how explicit the consent was. Similarly, Uber had to backtrack…

This Earth Day, join a study on motivating sustainable transportation behavior. I have blogged about the e-mission project earlier in the context of the National Transportation Data Challenge. (https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/making-cities-safer-data-collection-vision-zero/). To recap, e-mission focuses on building an extensible platform that can instrument the end-to-end multi-modal travel experience at the personal scale and collate it for analysis at the societal scale. In particular, it combines background data collection of trips, classified by modes, with user-reported incident data, and context-sensitive surveys. I also blogged earlier about involving undergraduates in research (https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/getting-a-dozen-20-year-olds-to-work-together-for-fun-and-social-good/). To recap, the challenges at the time included managing different skill levels, compressing the learn-plan-build cycle into one semester, and the fact that undergraduates typically don’t have the experience to build platform…