Hacking Happiness (2 page)

And that’s when I got mad. I got deeply, deeply pissed.

I
should get to determine my identity.
I
should get to determine how the digital journal of my life in the form of my data gets broadcast, sold, or valued.

And so should you if you want your life in the digital world to count.

•

As you may already have guessed, the happiness described in this book is not focused on mood but is the result of an introspective examination of what brings you purpose or meaning. In other words, you have to take action regarding what defines your life to truly see what brings you joy.

That’s where the idea of “hacking” comes into play. The main definition of hacking involves cybercrime. This is not my focus. I’m referring to a different sort of “hacking” that involves the creative reimagining of a long-held idea for the sake of joyful discovery. That’s the spirit in which I invite you to read this book. I see data and technology, when leveraged via informed choice, as being instrumental toward insightful living.

The idea of self-examination, focused on your digital as well as real self, is where the subtitle for the book comes from—
why your personal data counts and how tracking it can change the world
. Your data counts because it represents who you are, and has value intrinsically and economically. I’m sure you’re aware that other people are already tracking your data—marketers, governments,
and organizations of every size around the world. That’s why a primary goal for me in writing this book is to simply help you do the same, so you can enjoy the benefits of managing your data to gain insights that can increase your well-being.

The (app) part of
Hacking H(app)iness
refers to the number of apps and other technologies I cover in the book that can measure or track your emotional and physical health and well-being. I’ve also broken up the book into three parts based on the (app) acronym, which I explain in detail later in the introduction. While this isn’t a traditional self-help or how-to book, I have provided numerous examples and case studies of how technology applied to emotion and economics can improve your life and help define what brings you meaning.

Here’s what I’ve set out to prove in this book:

•
Data is getting personal.
Data about people’s sleep, dietary, and work habits, sex lives, and emotions is being collected online and analyzed. Our current online economy is built on the managing of people’s data without their full knowledge of the process. It’s a dangerous precedent that needs to be reversed.

•
Happiness can be quantified and increased.
The science of positive psychology is empirically based. Mobile sensors in our phones and data from the world around us can contribute information about our lives that we can utilize to increase positive well-being and essential, long-lasting happiness. While emotions are ephemeral and subjective by nature, data-identifying triggers leading to or around them are being leveraged to improve people’s lives in revolutionary ways.

•
The happiness economy is redefining wealth.
Countries such as Bhutan, the United Kingdom, Brazil, China, and the United States are using happiness indicators that reflect multiple metrics beyond money to measure and improve the lives of their citizens. People are being encouraged to leverage skills and talents for
civic engagement that are providing previously untapped stores of resources that are changing the world for good.

Here’s why you’ll benefit from reading
Hacking H(app)iness
:

•
Informed Choice.
What you do with your data is your decision. But I want you to see vividly that complacency about giving away your digital identity is not a choice you should allow for yourself or loved ones any longer.

•
Joyful Discovery.
Measuring your life isn’t easy, but with mobile tools and positive psychology, there’s never been a better time to start the journey. There’s not a one-size-fits-all formula for this process, as it’s inherently your own, but your life will be richer by examining your value, and a great deal of this book is dedicated to showing you how.

•
The Currency of Connection.
Economics at its core is not about numbers or statistics as much as it’s a way of measuring and expressing value. You care about what you count—where your treasure is reflects your heart. People invent economic ideals. You’re allowed to evaluate what money and time mean for your life outside of established mind-sets. Soon, currency will revolve around your positive actions and reputation more than around wealth or words.

I’ll explain these concepts more fully before describing the breakdown of the book.

Unpacking the Hacking

Your Identity in Data

Let me be clear about a critical aspect of your digital identity—your data is being sold and you’re giving it away for free.

The model of tracking and behavioral targeting prevalent in the online world is accelerating the sale of your data, or your digital identity. While the companies involved in this form of commerce may not be mendacious in nature, this current advertising model erodes trust and is primed for disruption. If you’re like most, you may be accepting of this model because you don’t see all of its implications. Shane Green of Personal.com calls this phenomenon a form of the “Stockholm syndrome” in
Power-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy
.
¹
The actual syndrome occurs when a victim identifies with his captor over time, fostering feelings of empathy and submission. In our current Internet economy, citizens willingly sign away data that’s used in a variety of exploitative ways by government and business. The fact that they’re agreeing to byzantine legal agreements not understandable by most attorneys has faded in importance for the perceived benefit of “freemium” services offered in exchange for previous personal information.

Your data has value. Your actions, in aggregate with other people like you, provide clues to behavior that are a form of market research. To give an example of how our personal data has a
monetary
value, Steffan Heuer and Pernille Tranberg provide the following example in their e-book
Fake It! Your Guide to Digital Self-Defense
:

So how much are all of us worth online? The estimates vary, depending on whom you ask and what method you use to calculate. Lawyers in the U.S. representing users who felt their privacy was violated by apps that stole their address books from their mobile devices, estimated a price for each contact uploaded without permission. Their guess: between sixty cents and three dollars for each stolen contact, because services such as Path or Instagram can use them to acquire
new users and sell their information, or use it for targeted advertising down the road.
²

Where you are comfortable revealing this data or sharing rights to access it, that’s your call. In the near future, you’ll have more choices on how to use your data, as Shane Green told me when I interviewed him on this subject:

In the current world, there’s a shotgun approach toward monetizing data online. This practice will begin to shift toward the individual so they’re not “selling their data” but will be “compensated for access to their data.” This new world will be a place where the individual is empowered and becomes savvy about how data reaches them.
³

But that time has not yet arrived. In December 2012, the Federal Trade Commission announced it would be studying the data broker industry’s collection and use of consumer data, based on an earlier FTC report,
Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: Recommendations for Businesses and Policymakers
.
⁴
The report noted that data brokers often don’t interact directly with consumers, even though they’re collecting and selling information about them. This means the average person isn’t even aware data brokers exist or who may be buying and selling their data. As the FTC press release notes, “This lack of transparency also means that even when data brokers offer consumers the ability to access their data, or provide other tools, many consumers do not know how to exercise this right.
There are no current laws requiring data brokers to maintain the privacy of consumer data
unless they use that data for credit, employment, insurance, housing, or other similar purposes” (italics mine)
.
⁵

Sadly, it’s not just data brokers who are ignoring data privacy. The release of Facebook’s Graph Search in March 2013 allows any
Facebook user to type in a name and see photos of other users who may not have wanted those photos to be public. As Sarah Perez notes in TechCrunch, Graph Search deepens confusion around privacy because other people’s posting behavior affects you whether or not they’ve asked your permission.
⁶
As an example, she explains how a college friend had posted and tagged a slightly embarrassing picture of her without her knowledge or consent, and notes how complicated Facebook’s privacy settings are to figure out, and how time-consuming it can be to remove tags around images other people have posted of you.

Facebook users tagging friends without consent moves the muddled state of online commerce to a whole new level. Now the Stockholm syndrome of people identifying with their captors has shifted, so consumers are inadvertently expediting the rise of a personal data economy dictated by advertising. Our complacency toward behavioral targeting means we’re not only giving our data away for free but also accelerating and improving how advertisers and strangers access the digital breadcrumbs of other people in our lives.

I interviewed Kaliya (aka Identity Woman), executive director of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, on this idea about losing control and giving data away and she noted, “The metaphor of slavery or feudalism is appropriate—the power dynamic between ‘us’ and the institutions that have our data is the problem that needs to be rebalanced, and until it is—we are slaves to our digital masters.”
⁷

The Future Value of Your Connected Life

The idea of data as related to identity has shifted in the past few years. Most of us grasp the concept of our online actions being tracked by cookies, or the notion that GPS can track our location. But the rise of wearable devices like Fitbit or the Nike+ FuelBand
has begun to show average consumers visualizations of their data like they’ve never seen it before.

For athletes or the health-conscious, workout tracking used to rely on things like stopwatches and clipboards. Now sensors in wearable devices output data that can be tracked passively. This means users don’t need to constantly input the specifics of their activities—devices do this for them. Connected to an iPhone or directly accessible by their doctors, this real-time aggregate assessment data is creating a revolution in the health industry. But it’s also creating a stir akin to the online situation I’ve described above: Who owns your data? Who can sell it? How is it being used?

The trend of tracking data via wearable devices is commonly referred to as the quantified self (QS) movement (a term coined by Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf of
Wired
), which typically involves individuals knowingly measuring their own behavior. This passive tracking ability has also moved offline to the devices and world around us, a trend known as the Internet of Things (IOT). There are a number of variations of this term, like machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies being utilized by the auto industry, or the Internet of Everything as coined by Cisco. The combination of QS and IOT results in a vast scope of information being recorded about our lives at all times, a trend referred to as Big Data.

What’s so critical to understand about this data evolution is the logical transference of existing online norms around privacy and advertising that will likely be utilized in the
Outernet
, the virtual extension of the Internet that exists around us at all times but remains hidden from sight. The advent of a technology called augmented reality (AR), however, changes this dynamic as it allows for people to see data overlaid on the screen of their mobile phones or lenses of a device like Google Glass.

While many tend to focus on the applications of augmented reality mainly for gaming, I see its primary significance as a browser for this impending virtual world. I’ve written about AR since 2009
and its many benefits for business, health, and commerce, but, like any technology, it’s the context of how it’s used and by whom that is critical to establishing trust.

Google has faced numerous instances of eroding trust over the past few years relating to data usage and privacy. In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission fined Google $22.5 million for bypassing privacy settings in the Safari browser, the largest civil penalty ever levied by the FTC. And in March 2013, Google publicly acknowledged that it violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project, as reported by David Streitfeld of the
New York Times
.
⁸
The company agreed to settle the case with thirty-eight states that rejected the unauthorized collection and use of people’s data.

The case is of special interest as a precedent with regard to Google’s Glass technology. If Google had no problem outfitting cars to collect people’s data, why would they fret over wearable computers that can do the same? And if users have become complacent over privacy, as demonstrated by Facebook Graph Search behavior, then all the better for companies like Google and Facebook. People can continue to be the free conduits of evolving online commerce, believing their data is worth the cost.