“500 million people are now doing the same thing I’ve been doing for 7 years.” – An Interview with Hasan Elahi

Last week I got a chance to talk to Hasan Elahi, an interdisciplinary media artist known for his 7-year-long self-tracking project that helped him escape from the terrorist watch list of U.S government. The conversation with Hasan Elahi is a fruitful one, as it deepened my understanding towards identity and data sharing, and opened up new directions for my thesis investigation.

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Me: I really admire and appreciate the rule you have set up for yourself, and it is a very powerful statement you have made. But for me, I can’t stop thinking if there is any push-n-pull between the fact and information shared about you. How high would be the stake if you were to lie one thing about yourself with the data? And what might be the safest way to do so?

Hasan: My motivation behind the project is to create an alibi and to protect my own safety. In my case, the stake of lying can be really high. Because the data is not just my geographic location and the photos of the places I have been to, but also the account statement of every transactions I make, the ATM machine activities, the flight ticket I booked… it’s easy for someone to verify and supervise the data at any point. What I am doing, I think, should not be described as “deception”, but “hiding”.

Me: So How did you hide?

Hasan: It is about how the data is presented. You know, I could have made a stream line of the data, but instead of doing that, I made them in points and segments. The photos are displayed in a non lineage way and gathered according to the type of the activity. This makes it difficult to dig out any data in the past and piece together the actual story, because there are gaps everywhere, between each frames and that’s why the time has become extremely important for someone to study the data.

Me: How often is the tracking data updated?

Hasan:The updates happen automatically everytime it detects a change in the location, But moving around my own apartment will not result in the change of location. But if leave my place and go to the grocery store, it will interpret it as a change and logs it.

Hasan: If you think about it, you’ll find my data is exactly what trial lawyers have to deal with for years. There are, say, 1,500 pages of evidences but only 2 paragraphs of the text is valuable to the case. Most people don’t have the patience to go through all of the data, or they can’t tell the valuable data from the useless one. The sheer amount of info is valuable on one hand, but on the other hand if one does not know how to approach and use this value, much is of little for them.

Me: Is it also a statement about how little we know how to use the data being collected?

Hasan: Absolutely. When we don’t have the proper strategy of analyze the data, and we don’t understand what is meaningful and what comes out of that data, the access to the information becomes something useless. We are now in a culture of information gathering where we don’t equally understand information analysis. The more you look at the data on my tracking site, the more anonymous you’ll find I am. I have created so much noise about me that you couldn’t really tell which data points are most closely linked to me and my activities.

Me: Do you think tracking one’s own life can also be viewed as an act for privacy defense?

Hasan: In my case, it is not exactly a privacy defense, as basically, I have no privacy. But what I did is something you can call self-identification. It usually comes out of something bad said about you in the past, and you have to reconstruct your image. For example, when you Google your name and found the first result being listed is something shady. Google will not help you filter the search result and you have to do it yourself. What you can do is you create a whole bunch of new information about yourself and make that the top results of Google search. It is a process of generating information you want others to perceive who you are.

Me: I found a new application on iPhone called Path, which, actually allows people to exactly what you have been doing for 7 years. You can tag things in a picture and share them, while the software will also keep a path of the places you have been.

Hasan: That is very interesting. It reminds me of the very first day when I started the project. When I told people that I wanted to track myself, they thought I was a psycho. (One personal called me creep.) Years later, one may find that I was actually doing a pre-twitter and pre-facebook project and now there are 500,000 people who are doing the same thing.

Genres of Lies

Yesterday I had some light reading with the book “A Brief History of Lies“. The most delicious part to me is when the author talked about genres of lies, and below are the genres I think is insightful:

• Ambiguity: This is a deliberate attempt to mislead through the misuse of logic and the misuse of a talent for oratory. Syllogisms can be misused in this way. It is also a mainstay of comedy, where we can recognize it instantly, but sometimes we fail to recognize it as lying elsewhere.
• Brazen: A brazen lie is one which is told when it is obvious to the theller and to those a child who has chocolate all around his mouth who denies that he has eaten any chocolate is brazen liar.
• Fabrication: is saying something without actually knowing whether or not it is true.
• Hoax: Anything that happens for April 1st reasons.
• Jargonese: It is the same today in India where the law is in English while the majority of the population don’t read in English. This lack of understanding is devised to support those ‘in-the-know’ and extends to many spheres of activitiy beyond the law.
• Noble: A noble lie would normally cause discord if it were uncovered, but it assists the community when it is given. It maintains law and other which helps the rulers.
• Pathological: According to recent studies people who exhibit this condition have brains incapable of differentiating between the truth and fiction because of the way their synapses are connecting in the front of their brains.
• Perjury: A crime. Making verifiably false statements on a material matter under oath of affirmation in a court of law, or in any of various sworn statements in writing.
• Propaganda: Information is always propagandist and contains bias bt sometimes this bias is intended. Advertisements are an obvious example.
• Vindictive: These are aimed at harming someone, a group, organization or country. Whilst thought among the worst kind of lies, lies given to one’s lover are considered worse, at least by the lover.
• White: A white lie would cause no argument if it were found out. They avoid giving offence, such as complimenting something one finds unattractive. But be careful, a white lie in one culture may be perjury in another.

How to both benefit and hide away from on-line search engine

Everyone has their own little strategies of using on-line search engine to find an answer. We know that tweaking the spelling or the order of the keywords can help us gain faster and more precise answer with Google search. And we more or less have a sense of the patterns of the search tools, though we don’t know exactly the algorithms they are based upon. But how about hiding from it? Using the search engine to figure out where you can hide and make the answer “difficult for other to find” is totally another type of intelligence.

To learn about how people deal with the issue of using on-line search as a “double folded weapon”, benefiting oneself and incapacitating others, I designed a game where the participants used on-line searches to both raise questions to and answer questions from their opponents.

This is how it works

It was found that as the game continued, the participants started to have more concern towards how the answer to their question can be accessed through search engines by the other team, thus adjusted their way of speaking accordingly to avoid the expressions most likely to be sought out. The result was that they started to play “trick” by using misleading and ambiguous information in their questions so that their opponents would have no way to obtain the most efficient keywords to filter through the information, or did not even know where to start.

It fascinates me to find through the experiment, how fast people adjust their way of expressing to their condition, with high awareness of the pros and cons of the media they use. The result was that people tended to hide “literally” by giving misleading and even deceptive information, probably because of the limited time they were given to design the questions and it was the fastest technique they can utilize as a reaction of defending.

After documenting the whole process, I watched closely at the footage and highlighted the moments where such behaviors occurred, and analyzed the language used by the participants at those moments. The tactics of “making tricks” fell into several categories, such as omission, misleading, ambiguity, paradox and concepts exchange. The process of analysis found here.

Work-in-Progress Exhibition at Art Center

Can repeating the same things 14 times to 14 people help creating a better thesis?

I still need to figure why Art Center adopts such way of getting your work critiqued, but… as a result, I did kill my thesis in some way, as I realized the inconsistency between my projects is so huge that I struggled to state them across a single message.

But right after, a new thesis was born on top of the big mess I made…

Good bad news.