
You are your phone - tmbsundar
http://www.roughtype.com/?p=6683
======
abruzzi
While I think using this kind of data is a bad thing from a privacy
perspective, the first thought I had reading this article was "what about
minimal users?" Specifically people like me, I use my phone for phone and web.
No social media, no texting. I probably use the phone 5-10 times a day, and
mostly for very short time periods.* (Actually I also use it for a clock, but
that doesn't take me past the lock screen, so I don't know if it counts.)

So maybe there is a classification that you can determine for minimal users
(and I doubt they all come from the same socio-economic group), but aside from
GPS logging (which apple tells us the don't do) there are large gaps where
they don't know if I'm filing bankruptcy or golfing at a $100k a year club.

I know I'm in the quickly diminishing minority in the world, but if you build
your business around using a trove of data that is not available for a subset
of potential customers, do you bar them from becoming customers, or fall back
to standard mechanisms?

* The article mentions people under representing their usage, so I'll just add that my three year old iPhone 5S is usually at about 95% charge at the end of the day, and the only time I've seen it below 90% was during an extended trip outside, or at the border of reception areas.

~~~
soylentcola
Isn't that how credit and lending work to some extent? My credit history is
relatively sparse but it used to be nearly nonexistent. My main source of
credit history comes from using my Visa for typical monthly purchasing while
paying it off every month. I don't have a car loan. I had a motorcycle loan
that I only took because I wanted to build credit and could've easily just
paid cash.

Even getting that was a bit of a hassle and they only gave me the small loan
(around $5000) because my income and expenses clearly showed I shouldn't have
any issues paying for it. Outside of some minor low-interest student loan debt
in the $10k range, I just don't have much history.

If I wanted to get a better credit card or some other loan/line of credit, I'd
have a harder time getting approved for decent terms because I simply don't
like to deal with debt. Like you, this makes me a minority (or at least a less
desirable customer for lenders). I'd imagine it's a similar case. Some might
decline to do business with me. Others might offer worse terms.

It's kinda unfortunate because in order to prove my creditworthiness, it would
seem I need to do things that I consider less financially wise (take out car
loans or other lines of credit to establish a record of paying them off).

~~~
cubano
I'm not an expert, but I do know paying off your total credit card debt every
month does nothing to help your credit score and, in fact, may even kinda hurt
it.

You would be far better off to get 2-3 cards, ring up some debt on each of
them, and then make the monthly minimum payment, on-time, for 6-12 months.

For sure you would see a pretty big jump in your score doing that.

~~~
falcolas
You're partially correct. If you are paying everything off, you will not be
rated as high as someone who is carrying a reasonable amount debt every month.

Why? If you pay everything off (no interest), the banks make no money, so
you're simply not as attractive of a customer to lend money to. So, it's not
about the payment, it's about using debt.

Other negatives: Reposession, defaulting on debts, bankruptcy, late payments,
having monthly payments over some percentage over your income... it varies by
provider (and most of it's automated).

Source: Worked for a 3rd party which does the actual approval and denial
calculations for many different providers.

~~~
derefr
It's not about _how much_ you pay off each month at all. The banks don't
calculate credit scores—the credit reporting agencies do. And the credit-
reporting agencies don't think that way.

The thing about credit event streams is that they're very low-detail:
basically they amount to, for each credit instrument you have, a series of
{pay-period, code} pairs with nine possible codes, R1-R9. Your score is
entirely calculated† by taking (a seven-year sliding window of) those event-
codes and applying weights to them. R1, the most-positively-weighted event,
just means "paid on time this month."

The thing you want to do to build good credit quickly, is to generate _as many
R1 events as you can_. You _can_ carry some of your debt on a card to
"stretch" one large charge into multiple R1 events... but a more efficient
strategy (that doesn't involve paying any interest) is to simply have several
cards, use them all for at least one trifling thing each month, and then pay
them _all_ off each month. Three cards you paid off $5 charges on is three
R1s, and counts for _just as much_ as one $500 charge you paid in three
instalments (also three R1s.)

If you want to dig in and see exactly how much information a CRA will give
you, here's a Ruby implementation of the Experian Connect API:
[https://github.com/ehutzelman/experian](https://github.com/ehutzelman/experian)

\---

† Well, okay, there's also two other things:

1\. a positively-weighted factor for how much unused credit each instrument
holds each month. Which usually translates to "you get punished for carrying
an 80%+ balance on a credit card." The key with this one is that—all else
being equal—it's better to have cards with higher credit limits, because then
you're not using as much of each instrument's capacity, and that reflects
better on you.

2\. a negatively-weighted factor for any "hard inquiries" that the credit-
reporting agency had to respond to within some time window. Each time you
apply for a credit instrument and the loaning institution asks the reporting
agency to calculate your credit score _for the purpose of determining credit
eligibility_ , that's a "hard inquiry" event. (You can think of these as their
own credit event on a "meta" instrument held by the reporting agency itself.)
Unlike normal credit instruments, there are no industry standards on how to
set the weights or time-window for the effects of "hard inquiries", but the
windows are _usually_ short (~6 months), AFAIK. All else being equal, don't
quickly, repeatedly apply for credit: each successive loaning institution will
see a lower score. (And note the "for the purpose of determining credit
eligibility" bit. There's another kind of event, a "soft inquiry", that
happens when you—or some third-party on your behalf—just asks the reporting
agency for your credit score in order to know it, or background-check you, or
whatever else. I'm pretty sure none of the big three CRAs in the US give any
weight to a "soft inquiry" event.)

~~~
etjossem
Edit, did my own research: these codes are part of the credit report and
represent the status of the account each month. They aren't the only factor
(length of history, utilization, number of accounts, and type of accounts
matters too):

R0 or I0: Not enough credit history to judge risk.

R1 or I1: On-time payment, in 1 month.

R2 or I2: Late payment, in 2 months.

R3 or I3: Late payment, in 3 months.

R4 or I4: Late payment, in 4 months.

R5 or I5: 120+ day late reporting.

R7 or I7: Consolidated debt payment.

R8 or I8: Repossession.

R9 or I9: Default.

------
n_time
the cavalier attitude this article shows towards inferring character
assessments based on metrics makes me feel uneasy.

given the equally casual approach most technologists have towards embedding
user behaviours into applications, the potential feedback loop of many
companies deliberately creating habits in users, and then other firms judging
those people based on their collected habits is distressing.

instead of sneaking malware and pop ups on to your computer as you browse, the
malware is installed inside of you, as habits. there's no glaring pop up
telling me there's something wrong with my windows license.

having uninstalled my social apps for several weeks now, i still find myself
turning the phone on and staring at the homescreen for a few seconds. my eyes
dully glazed over. it's more insidious than the popup, which i could close
with a click. with this, i have to be mindful, and grab back the reins of my
body. the process is internal.

given the research on the involuntary nature of habits, i question the ethics
of creating these behaviours at all.

is it ethical to create involuntary behaviours in your users?

is it ethical to judge users for behaviours deliberately created in them by
applications?

should the attention of users be better protected?

can we start developing consumer applications that aren't deliberately
designed to capitalise on the attention of their users?

how can we educate people to navigate a world of applications designed to hold
and capitalise on their attention?

media awareness class in high school did not prepare me for this brave new
world. :P

~~~
karmacondon
_is it ethical to create involuntary behaviours in your users?_

Yes. Coke, McDonalds, The Gap and every other consumer company try like hell
to create involuntary behaviors in people all the time.

 _is it ethical to judge users for behaviours deliberately created in them by
applications?_

Yes. Other than the specificity of the words "by applications", this is what
credit scores are designed to do. Madison Avenue in deliberately trying to
create behaviors in all of us. A credit rating measures a person's ability to
resist that when it isn't financially sound.

 _should the attention of users be better protected?_

No, at least not for adults of sound mind. People are free to make their own
decisions, whether that's doing a keg stand or spending 3 hours clicking a
button on Farmville. People can be warned about potential dangers, but it
probably won't have much of an effect.

 _can we start developing consumer applications that aren 't deliberately
designed to capitalise on the attention of their users?_

Yes. Or at least, you and anyone else who wants to can. But making products
that people use frequently is a common definition of success. Most comapnies
aren't going to pass that up because some people have addictive personalities.

 _how can we educate people to navigate a world of applications designed to
hold and capitalise on their attention?_

Good luck with that. Education vs the Forces of Capitalism. Winner:
Capitalism.

~~~
n_time
> Yes. Coke, McDonalds, The Gap and every other consumer company try like hell
> to create involuntary behaviors in people all the time.

The appeal to authority that you have connected to the actions of corporations
in regard to ethics does not answer the question I posed. If you want to
discuss these companies in particular, I would say that they have all violated
what are considered good ethics many times.

Is their creation of involuntary habits ethical?

> No, at least not for adults of sound mind.

What about children and teenagers then? We ban them from cigarettes and
gambling. How about apps that are designed like a VLT?

> Farmville

Wasn't Farmville found to be targeting lonely retirees of questionably sound
mind?

> Yes. Or at least, you and anyone else who wants to can. But making products
> that people use frequently is a common definition of success. Most comapnies
> aren't going to pass that up because some people have addictive
> personalities.

The destination of my question was regulation surrounding technology and
addictive software. I am not an American, so this notion is not anathema to
me. :)

> Good luck with that. Education vs the Forces of Capitalism. Winner:
> Capitalism.

This is just so cynical it hurts me.

------
Vraxx
Honestly this is the type of thing that motivates me to care about privacy.
Arguing against "Why should I care if I don't do anything wrong" never seems
like it has an impact on either side of the argument, but this type of data
analysis shows very vividly that you can be impacted by this data gathering in
very meaningful ways even if you aren't doing anything traditionally thought
of as wrong. The even scarier part of this is that these are patterns of
borderline subconscious behavior that can "determine" certain traits about
you. Before, worrying about posting uncouth content on social media is a very
conscious worry/action that you take when representing yourself of the
internet. Micromanaging my phone behaviors sounds much more tedious and
burdensome.

~~~
scholia
_> Micromanaging my phone behaviors sounds much more tedious and burdensome._

Sounds impossible ;-)

I'm sure conclusions can equally be drawn from the way people try to
micromanage their phone behaviors....

~~~
Vraxx
Yeah, I guess "fruitless nightmare" more aptly describes my feelings for the
idea of micromanaging my phone behaviors. Either way, I think this kind of
data extrapolation is a lot more likely to get people who don't normally care
about privacy violations to begin caring.

------
tantalor
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sTegRqo...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sTegRqoQDfsJ:www.roughtype.com/%3Fp%3D6683+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
fluxquanta
Articles like this, coupled with my increasing dissatisfaction with how social
media makes me feel and how my thought process throughout the day feels
fractured, really make me want to give up my smartphone entirely. However, I
can't bring myself to get over the fear and dread of being "disconnected".

Is there anyone here who has given up their smartphone and has any advice on
how you did it, and how you are now? Is it even possible to do so working in a
tech field?

~~~
zzalpha
There's an alternative: use your smartphone for productivity only and drop all
the social crap. This begins by uninstalling all the apps you struggle with
(Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, etc).

Now get used to putting your phone down and forgetting about it. My phone
exists on demand for _me_ , not the other way 'round. So it might sit on my
desk or on my coffee table but it's almost always on silent/do-not-disturb
(with the except of a few key contacts like my wife who are allowed to bug
me).

A smartphone is an incredible tool. Having access to the internet wherever you
are has immense value. Being able to communicate with folks on-demand is very
useful. But it shouldn't control your life. So learn to use the tool as just
that, a tool, rather than a tether. It can be done!

~~~
scholia
_" how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text
messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they
enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates
with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit."_

That's more than social media use....

~~~
zzalpha
I was responding to the commenter, not the article.

The reality is, the smartphone is just another in a very very long line of
ways to gather information about folks.

Before the phone, there was credit rating agencies, who have access to your
entire financial history, including credit card purchases, bill payments, bank
loans, etc (for decades, now, Experian, Acxiom, etc, have known more about you
could possibly imagine). Then we got the loyalty/reward cards, where people
traded their purchase history for low low prices. Then we saw the rise of the
internet and cloud services of all kinds (Google and Facebook).

Frankly, I wouldn't even put the phone at the top of my list of concerns, as
at least my phone is on my person, and I have some level of control over it...

~~~
scholia
Agreed. Except you left out travel cards ;-)

 _> Frankly, I wouldn't even put the phone at the top of my list of concerns,
as at least my phone is on my person, and I have some level of control over
it..._

Well, up to a point. A lot of info is leaking through apps, which can be hard
to control. [http://jots.pub/a/2015103001/](http://jots.pub/a/2015103001/)

Also, you have to remember to turn off Wi-Fi or companies will use that to
track you.
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/datablog/2014/jan/10/h...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/datablog/2014/jan/10/how-
tracking-customers-in-store-will-soon-be-the-norm)

Obviously you can still be tracked via cell towers, but it's not much of a
phone if you turn that off as well ;-)

------
bambax
We like to think we can find "secrets" by eavesdropping on private data and
determining the creditworthiness of someone according to how they enter their
contacts onto their address book.

But I'm pretty sure the correlation between loans repayment and very public
and easily accessible socio-economic data is much stronger than with those
quirky behavioral traits, such as: where you live, did you attend / finish
college, how you spell, do you have a job, are you married, etc.

------
vezzy-fnord
I'm a rather unorthodox case in that I own several smartphones, but never use
the telephony or even any social and entertainment applications. Instead, I
treat them as testing grounds for various alternative platforms like KDE
Plasma Mobile, Ubuntu Touch, Replicant, CyanogenMod and so forth.

My actual phone is a prepaid flip phone.

(At the risk of invoking "le wrong generation," I'm a Millennial. I find a
certain humor in observing how older people are glued to their smartphones in
spite of the frequent complaints that are implicitly assumed about me. I will
grant that pathological smartphone obsession is a disgruntling phenomenon, but
hardly contained to Millennials. I frequently find myself the odd one out
_not_ checking their smartphone in a waiting room.)

------
atirip
Meh. Creditworthiness based on your online activities is solution looking for
a problem. It hardly is issue for loaners today. The problem is how to lend
more, not less. So no fear here, if you are good today, you are good tomorrow,
no matter the online activity. Secondly if and when really some loaners
voluntarily limit their market, there will always be who do not and whose
position on the market will be total ignorance of online stuff.

------
dinkumthinkum
It's really hard to take this seriously. First this "study" for the purpose of
making generalizations or deciding credit worthiness is pretty silly. The
sample is not representative of much. Whether people put last names in their
phone? What is this, pseudo-sociological hokum? Why don't we just use
phrenology and call it a day? Why don't we just ask people to move their mouse
in a JavaScript app on the credit decision site and those that take "strong
ardent movements" will be the most credit worthy. Now the credit counseling
services will focus less on getting your finances in order but giving you
"insider tips" like "enter last names in your phone" or "keep a second phone
for games." This is just a crock of nonsense.

It's like "data mining" is a hammer and everything is a nail or something.

------
cubano
It would be beyond great if someone would create an open source version of
that graph so I can see just how much of my info is being captured and used
for and/or against me on a daily basis.

I specifically carry an unlocked android handset that is not connected to a
carrier, and use a custom ROM that allows me to turn off my cell radio to
prevent that sort of tracking.

I use a throwaway google account but do sometimes check my real email thru the
device (and so have the account on the device as a user), but sometimes turn
on wifi location for various reasons, so I can't really tell how much "they"
know.

I just wonder...is anything I'm doing really helping things?

------
J_Darnley
If I don't have one then does that mean I don't exist? Oh my god! I can feel
myself fading!

~~~
rawTruthHurts
I guess we are not the target. I don't know if that means we're safe.

------
okasaki
If the algorithms are accurate I don't see the problem. If a loan is denied
because phone use analysis shows that the applicant most likely won't pay it
back, then that's good isn't it?

------
SandersAK
If you think that what defines you is a series of recorded or remembered
events, worrying about this makes a lot of sense.

Loan providers using this instead of their predatory bullshit system now seems
ok to me.

------
PuffinBlue
Site seems to be under heavy load. Mirror (fullpage screenshot):

[http://i.imgur.com/4cX12xZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/4cX12xZ.png)

------
ignaces
it died

~~~
qntty
You are your phone

The fact can no longer be avoided: You are your phone. The pattern of
smartphone use is the pattern of the self. This is who you are:

Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the
phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday
alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Silicon Valley lending startups are
looking to base personal loan decisions on analyses of data from individuals’
phones. The apps running on a person’s device, entrepreneurs have found,
“generate huge amounts of data — texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social-media
posts, retail receipts, and so on — indicating thousands of subtle patterns of
behavior that correlate with repayment or default.” How you use your phone
reveals more than you think:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s
battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they
travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the
decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a
decision to extend credit. Meanwhile, the New York Times today reports on a
new study published in Science that reveals how a person’s economic status can
be determined through a fairly simple analysis of phone use. The researchers,
working in Africa, collected details “about when calls were made and received
and the length of the calls” as well as “when text messages were sent, and
which cellphone towers the texts and calls were routed through.” They analyzed
this metadata to “build an algorithm that predicts how wealthy or impoverished
a given cellphone user is. Using the same model, the researchers were able to
answer even more specific questions, like whether a household had
electricity.”

I am not a number, you declare. I am more than a credit score. You may well
be. But the tell-tale phone reveals more than one’s financial standing and
trustworthiness. The tell-tale phone reveals all. Take a look at that chart
again:

Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the
phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday
alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

It shows the pattern of one person’s smartphone use over a two-week period,
beginning late on a Friday afternoon. Each vertical line represents a single
use of the phone, the width of the line showing how long the use extended. The
chart comes from a new study on phone use, published in PLOS ONE. Four UK
researchers installed a usage-tracking app on the smartphones of twenty-three
students and staff members at the University of Lincoln, and then examined the
data after two weeks. They discovered that “a simple measure — recording when
the phone is in use — can provide a vast array of information about an
individual’s daily routine.” Data on phone use, to take a simple example,
provides “a non-invasive indication of sleep length.” All but one of the test
subjects used their phones as an alarm clock on weekdays, and all of them
without exception reported that the last thing they do before going to sleep
is to check their phone. Gaps in use during the day are also good indicators
of naps.

The test subjects used their phones more than five hours a day, on average.
Much of that usage went on unconsciously, the researchers found. When the
subjects were asked to estimate how often they checked their phone during a
day, the average answer was 37 times. The tracking data revealed, however,
that the subjects actually used their phones 85 times a day on average, more
than twice as often as they thought. “For exploring checking behaviours,” the
researchers report, “estimated number of uses show little reliability for
measuring actual uses.” We see here how deeply entwined the phone has become
with the self — a seamless extension of body, mind, and personality. It is so
much a part of us that we are no more conscious of the device moment-to-moment
than we are of, say, our hands.

If the mere tracking of phone use reveals how we spend our days, our diurnal
routines, imagine what would be revealed by a deeper analysis, one that
examined the apps we use, the people we connect with, the things we look at
and listen to, what we say and what we write and what we like, where we go,
what we search for, the photos we take. It’s all there, public self and
private self. There’s no shame in admitting the fact: You are your phone.

~~~
solnyshok
my first thought was that commenter's phone died.

