

Lumosity: a warning to users (2009) - raverbashing
https://www.indregard.no/2009/05/28/lumosity-a-warning-to-users/

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vijayr
Just curious, how do sites delete data from backups? If I were a member of a
site for say 5 years, do they have some process to delete my information from
a backup taken months (or years) ago? Or is it just delete from the db, so
backups from _now on_ don't contain the info?

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Shamiq
Facebook has done a talk about this -- drop me an email.

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geetee
If this talk is, or can become, available online, please share a link. You've
got at least 2 interested people :) Thanks!

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oso96_2000
Definitely, it's an interesting topic. I would like to take a look too.

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lingben
A little tangential but an important fact nonetheless: there is zero evidence
that doing 'puzzles' improves cognition.

In fact, there is a mountain of evidence (and growing every day) which shows
that you can improve your brain health by getting up from your chair and doing
any sort of physical activity.

Even getting up and lifting one leg leaving your to balance your weight on the
other does more for your brain than sitting down and doing a mental puzzle or
cross-word, etc.

Just a thought :)

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comboy
I highly recommend reading "Brain that changes itself" by Norman Doidge. I
have no idea how good lumosity games really are, but you can improve your
cognition doing such "puzzles" if they are designed well.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Brain-That-Changes-
Itself/dp/01431...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Brain-That-Changes-
Itself/dp/0143113100)

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jordan0day
It is a little disconcerting that a website that purports to _enhance your
cognitive abilities_ (implying they can can measure your current abilities)
also won't agree to keep that data private.

But, alas, in today's market, this is completely unsurprising.

I did particularly like this line at the end (unrelated to the issue at hand,
instead in a section questioning Lumosity's effectiveness): "Disclaimer: I am
not a neuroscientist. But I do know statistics."

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incision
_> 'Which basically translates to: We share all the data we want with whoever
we want as long as it helps us. For instance, it clearly «assists» Lumosity to
share the data on my skills to a paying recruitment agency or university.'_

I think the most profitable use of this data wouldn't be selling to
recruiters, but perhaps to note that Mary and Ben are 67, married and Mary's
performance on the exercises suggests accelerating dementia.

Medical practices, particularly questionable ones [1] would froth at the mouth
to have a lead on a guy who's ready to spend anything to have his wife back.
Insurance companies probably wouldn't mind a peek either.

As Lumosity makes all claps clear in the TOS [2] they're not a medical service
so I wouldn't imagine they'd be bound by any of the protections which apply to
actual medical records.

1: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/enbrel-for-stroke-and-
al...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/enbrel-for-stroke-and-alzheimers/)

2:
[http://www.lumosity.com/legal/terms_of_service](http://www.lumosity.com/legal/terms_of_service)

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eli
I don't actually agree that it would be especially profitable to sell this
data to recruiters. Either way, let's be careful about speculating about what
they _could_ probably get away with versus things they've actually done.

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incision
_> 'Either way, let's be careful about speculating about what they could
probably get away with versus things they've actually done.'_

I don't follow.

Once you have factual information about what has been done it's no longer
speculation.

Lumosity isn't going to come out and tell the world exactly how they process
and/or sell user data any more than Walmart or Google is.

In practice, such business process information is only ever revealed in court,
so all we'll ever have is speculation and logic plus the typically vague,
permissive privacy policy terms which gave shape to it.

~~~
eli
Just trying to temper the mob mentality. Most businesses could (read: could
probably get away with) selling your personal data. But that doesn't mean they
do. There is no market for e.g. what types of stories you read on a news site.
People also tend to overestimate the value of their data. Postal mailing
addresses are worth a bit. Email addresses a lot less. Your luminosity score,
I would imagine, is almost worthless to anyone besides luminosity and perhaps
a direct competitor.

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fogcity
They have recently added the ability to completely delete PII (personally
identifiable information) from their entire site, logs, etc, to conform to US
COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection) laws. Since they store things
like date of birth when you sign up, so that you can compare yourself to
others in your age group, when they turned on the features to comply with
COPPA, they had to encrypt and scrub a host of historical data to be in
compliance. Emails, names, etc.

Now, it's possible that the "delete account" button disappears when you
purchase (I don't know?), but that's why they have customer service who have
that ability. It may just be a customer retention or security policy to
require a human interfering to start the deletion process.

Additionally, at present, if you read their blogs, and the HCP site, you will
see that they use your data, without PII, to be part of larger research
studies to determine cognitive abilities of people of all walks of life.
Researchers use the platform for studies, and can compare active participants
against years of historical data in Lumosity's database.

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bincat
Is this essentially gamification of getting (and selling) users private
information?

Mental performance information is as private as it gets.

While this post is from years ago, it is very relevant today; Lumosity has
been incessantly advertising through NPR and I was actually thinking looking
into them.

I had hopes that perhaps this is for pay app and was considering how to handle
app privacy. Clearly not going to happen.

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nithinr6
I just checked. Now there is an option to delete your account in the settings.

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cj
There's a "Delete account" link on the settings page for non-paying users. It
disappears when you upgrade to the paid plan.

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codygman
Wonder if the link to that delete page works for paying users.

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jasonfrank
Perhaps they just didn't take the time to make a proper Delete Account
feature. With relational data, it can be non-trivial to scrub out all traces
of a given entity. There are tricky decisions to make about what cascading
effects such a delete should have. An easier approach is to "soft delete" by
marking the account as inactive.

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jstalin
A post from five years ago?

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raverbashing
Fair disclaimer, I missed the date.

However, by the amount of ads for Lumosity currently on TV I think the article
is still relevant.

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aroman
I had no idea Lumosity was that old. I assumed it was a recent fad in the past
year or so... at least that's when I first heard of it because of all the ads.

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incision
They launched in 2007 during peak brain training [1]. If you think it's bad
now, the ads for Brain Age [2] were incessant in the year prior.

1:
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q='brain%20training'](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q='brain%20training')

2:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Age:_Train_Your_Brain_in_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Age:_Train_Your_Brain_in_Minutes_a_Day)!

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dcalacci
this is a likely side effect of selling user data to data brokers or data co-
ops, where companies sell individual user data to a larger user database
that's accessible to all companies in the co-op or that pay for the data
broker's services.

an interesting case of 'who owns what' in terms of user data. You created the
data - does that mean you own it? does it mean you should have a right to
delete all record of you or that data for a service?

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walruscop
That is odd, but perhaps they're using the user data for a larger survey or to
better their product.

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lobotryas
Then they should have zero problems of deleting said data on request.

