Lately, we’re surveilling our loved ones via location-sharing apps, but is the motive to protect and connect just an illusion?
Location-sharing apps are growing in popularity, not just among families and Gen Z friend groups but with investors, too. (The tracking app Life360 made its Nasdaq debut earlier this month.)
If we're already passively sharing this information with companies almost all the time, why not share it with our loved ones?
Our guest, Dr Katina Michael, who was on the cutting edge of building location-based services in its earliest days, says that the trust and connection we desire when signing up for these apps is exactly what’s being lost by using them.
Michael is a professor at the school for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University. She researches emerging technologies and their corresponding social implications, and she’s published six books.
Also, Vass and Katrina discuss how boring it is to track Vass’ husband.
This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany. Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
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Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Vass Bednar [00:00:00] I'm Vass Bednar and I host this Globe and Mail podcast, Lately.
Katrina Ostad [00:00:03] And I'm Katrina Onstad, the executive producer of Lately.
Vass Bednar [00:00:06] Katrina, I wanted to tell you that I've been tracking my husband.
Katrina Ostad [00:00:10] Oh.
Vass Bednar [00:00:10] ...for the last week.
Katrina Ostad [00:00:12] Should I be alarmed or are you just very dedicated to this episode?
Vass Bednar [00:00:16] I'm very dedicated. I guess I just wanted to know what it would feel like.
Katrina Ostad [00:00:19] So what have you been learning in your week of tracking your husband?
Vass Bednar [00:00:25] Absolutely nothing. He drives at a safe pace. A little more detail on his bike routes. But, beyond that, nothing to write home about. You know? Absolutely nothing. I've no idea why people do this.
Katrina Ostad [00:00:40] Right. Well, this is it. I mean, it doesn't sound like very compelling content. And yet people really love these kinds of apps.
Vass Bednar [00:00:47] Yeah. I mean, there are other fun things to track that I've definitely peeked at, like, whale map or Shark Tracker. If you've ever tracked a package being delivered to you, it's not as detailed, but it's just as exciting, right? Oh, it's shipped from the warehouse, like, oh, it's out on the truck. That can be kind of fun.
Katrina Ostad [00:01:05] It's true. It's a little game.
Vass Bednar [00:01:06] It's a game. Yeah, it's a kind of voyeuristic thing, and maybe it feels comforting to have more data. More information. But what you and I are curious about today is why more and more people are constantly sharing their location with their family and friends. One estimate claims that in Canadian dollars, this is a global market valued at about $25 billion. And that just begs the question, which is if you love someone, should you track them? And your daughter was recently backpacking in Southeast Asia. Did you AirTag her?
Katrina Ostad [00:01:39] I do love her, but no, we didn't track her. And to me that is a reflection of that love. Actually, I know this is not the most popular opinion, but you know, she's in a gap year and she's experimenting with her autonomy. And I know that the most formative periods of my life happened privately and off the grid. And we didn't want to deny her that opportunity. But I do recognize that this might be looked at as terrible negligence. And I'm an outlier on this, especially because she herself stocks all of her friends constantly. Right. And I like to peer over her shoulder at Snapchat, and she shows me where everyone that she knows is that on the map. But these are questions that we are asking ourselves about our friends, our loved ones and parents, I think especially have to wrestle with this once they have kids. So what about you? I mean, are you going to track your little toddler when he can walk unassisted?
Vass Bednar [00:02:32] Unassisted. Yeah, right now I generally have a very strong sense of his location at all times. I don't think I track him, but I see...I sort of see the appeal or some of the comfort that it could bring.
Katrina Ostad [00:02:42] Sure.
Vass Bednar [00:02:43] But if I were, I would probably use a tool like Life360. This app, it's kind of a case study in the rise of location sharing as a technology and just as a way of being. The firm calls itself a family connection and safety company, which sounds very sweet. It used to be all about families, but now it's definitely broader than that. It's all about friends, loved ones, your kind of circle, and it's a really big company. It also owns something called Jiobit, which is a tracking device for kids, elderly, loved ones, pets, a lot of people track their pets. And Tile, which if you remember those tile trackers, they preceded AirTags. And these are just products that let you track your stuff. And a few weeks ago, Life360. They raised over $155 million on their initial IPO.
Katrina Ostad [00:03:35] Right? So Life360 started in 2007. And in a very short time, we've seen location sharing become really normalized, especially among, younger users, Gen-Z in particular. And the turning point is often identified as the moment when Apple combined Find My iPhone and Find My Friends and to Find My in 2019. And that's kind of the moment when location tracking turned into a form of social networking. Are we too casual about this? There are lots of stories out there about people abusing tracking technology, and the consequences can be terrifying, right? Stalking, abuse. There was a recent report in 404 Media detailing how a suspected human smuggler was using AirTags to track and control the woman that he brought into the US. Like this is chilling stuff.
Vass Bednar [00:04:16] Absolutely chilling. At the same time, this technology can be used to find missing people and not just lost phones. But what's the trade off to doing this? I mean, your data as usual. And in 2020, location data sales made up nearly 20%, so a pretty big chunk of Life360's revenue, but they stopped selling location data in 2022 after reporting from The Markup, revealed that they were one of the largest sources of raw location data for the industry. Which makes me wonder if we're already passively sharing this information with companies almost all the time, why not share it with our loved ones?
Katrina Ostad [00:04:54] Right? So this is kind of a question of today's episode, is sharing always caring?
Vass Bednar [00:05:01] Today we're speaking to Doctor Katina Michael, the professor at the school for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University. She researches mainly emerging technologies and their corresponding social implications. Katina has published six books, including Uberveillance: Social Implications. In our conversation, she talks about this concept, which she credits to her husband, fellow researcher MG Michael.
Katrina Ostad [00:05:29] One of my favorite factoids about her is that she was previously employed as a senior network engineer at Nortel, the infamous Canadian tech and telecom company. So she has this incredible arc where she was on the cutting edge of building location based services in the earliest days of the technology, and now she builds her scholarship around location sharing.
Vass Bednar [00:05:48] We reached Doctor Katina Michael at a conference in Cyprus. This is Lately. Do you track anyone that you love?
Katina Michael [00:06:13] In my heart. With somebody's consent, yeah, I have tracked people with technology, but I think in my heart the constant memory of someone is a bit like tracking.
Vass Bednar [00:06:26] Hmhm. Trusting technology over a person is something that people talk about in Reddit relationship threads sometimes. I love to kind of get deep in the creep. If you love someone, should you share your location? If your person doesn't share theirs, does it mean they don't love you? These are some of the conversations we've come upon, what's being measured here? Is this just about so-called trust, or is this something else?
Katina Michael [00:06:50] We might say that location services enhance trust or they erode trust. So if you trust me, let me follow you everywhere you go. So we have to remember that trust is dynamic. It's not static. So giving your consent over to somebody else and allowing them to track your whereabouts is a very special thing. We have cognitive trust, emotional trust and behavioral trust. You know, I trust my mom because for good reason, she's my mom and she always wants the best for me. And I can share my location with her. I can have emotional trust with a partner. And usually that's an intensified relationship where I love you so much of course, I wish for you to know where I am at all times. And then there's a behavioral trust that changes over time. There's a creation, there's a development and the maintenance side of tracking one another. And often the creation and development side is very exciting. But the maintenance can sometimes be a little bit of a rocky road and where some people fall apart in that interrelationship.
Vass Bednar [00:07:51] Many of us were introduced to location based sharing through Apple's Find My Friends back in 2011. There's also the gamification of building maps through Foursquare or Snapchat's map, or an app called Life360, and other programs that have paved the way for this new norm of beaming our location to our loved ones. Why are we attracted to these tools?
Katina Michael [00:08:17] Everything's become frictionless. We all interpret location in different ways, and we're not very accurate when we use language. And so the frictionless capability of being able to know that someone is where that X marks the spot without having to have a conversation around it, is alluring to most people. I just want to know where you are so we can have our dinner and not have to waste any time. And of course, people's time is becoming increasingly precious. We're living in an attention economy and we just want to get on with it. So if I can track you and find out where you are exactly in the precise location rather than approximate location, then it's really attractive for me as the finder or for us to find one another in a timely fashion.
Vass Bednar [00:09:03] So we tend to resist surveillance when it's from companies or from governments. So why are we doing it to ourselves? Why are we inviting this persistent surveillance?
Katina Michael [00:09:13] I think apart from it being embedded in applications, there's a longing for people to share things about themselves. And I do also believe that there's a proximity thing that happens through location dependance. It's actually getting quite close to someone. You know, we know their name, but knowing their location gives us more context to the current event status, whatever that is. Now, if it's a family, we already know a lot about our families, but we probably don't know everything. And I think location sharing gives us that additional capability to be that all seeing eye, where we know more about our loved ones in our immediate circle. In fact, we may know too much. And what we believe starts off in a behavioral trust, which is knowing where someone is, is a a beautiful thing that enhances bonds between people, can actually over time, depending on one's dynamic state, actually end up giving us mood swings, a feeling of depression, a feeling of anxiety that someone knows where we are all the time and there is no private space. Whether it's to make errors on our own or to explore things that perhaps our families or our friends may not condone, so that independence may be usurped by codependence and the tables can turn over time. So if you love me, let me know everything about you.
Vass Bednar [00:10:42] I want to go back in time a little bit. You worked at the Canadian company Nortel, developing location based services in the very early days of the technology. What was it originally intended to do, and what were your early hopes or the dreams for this technology?
Katina Michael [00:10:59] So at around about 1998, third year of my employment with Nortel Networks, we started studying intelligence services and we were dreaming up future mobile services. You know, we didn't call things the smart phone at the time.
Vass Bednar [00:11:13] Yeah.
Katina Michael [00:11:13] We were really limited on bandwidth, but we were thinking about intelligence services that were personal. So PAS, personal assistant services, and we were trying to figure out why would people use these services? How would they use them? Would we require bidirectional location sharing? And then you started to see the entrance of Wi-Fi. You know, we take Wi-Fi for granted, these wireless access nodes in buildings, but they didn't exist in the late 90s.
Vass Bednar [00:11:41] No.
Katina Michael [00:11:41] Not en masse. And they certainly weren't public at the time. So we've gone from GPS, an outdoor positioning system via the satellites, right through to an indoor system like Wi-Fi, wireless fidelity, right down to the granular level, which is either perhaps your nearest power points or some kind of Bluetooth node which is interacting. And so for a moment, think about it as a hierarchical positioning system. You can't hide. And you know, we've had famous sci fi movies like Enemy of the State that have shown that capability of being seamlessly tracked no matter where you are outdoors or indoors there's this handshake between the different network types, and you've got nowhere to hide.
Vass Bednar [00:12:24] Nowhere to hide. How do you personally feel about how these technologies have evolved?
Katina Michael [00:12:32] I love these technologies when I have control of them, and I trust how the data is being utilized for my benefit and my circles benefit. So it's not black or white. And we must remember that we do have control over what kind of visibility we give to the system, whether that system is allow it all the time to locate me, allow it only when I'm using the app and I'm in the app, ask me every time I do anything with the app or no, right now I just want to shut it down and don't allow it to track me. But it's great when I can turn it on and have control over it. But what increasingly is concerning me is that we are seeing trends of how our location data is being used alongside our identity information, and when we have studies pointing to the fact that we only require four x and y coordinates to identify who you are without knowing your name, without you providing a token or a biometric. And just with four location points, we know who you are, not just where you are. It becomes quite incredible because we're creatures of habit. When we study human activity monitoring, we see that week after week we sort of do the same things, and those locations may be at home, at work, at an entertainment venue or event, or dropping off or picking up a child or a thing or food or something other. And just think about your own lifestyles for a moment and reflect on that and the benefits and the risks and the costs that come with that. There's always positives and negatives to all technological developments.
Vass Bednar [00:14:14] Let me pick up on Life360 in particular, it claims to have 66 million members. It was originally pitched to families, but it's clear that they've expanded to go after this market of friendships. For instance, our sound designer, who's in his mid-twenties, he knows where his partner is at all times. Can you talk about that evolution, how the popularity of location sharing has widened from family to friends?
Katina Michael [00:14:43] Life360 is a great example. It was launched when we were doing quite a few studies on location services needing to share with families those who were closest members, and we trusted to share our location for convenience and for care for that matter. But of course, even in those situations, we have seen parents abuse control of the apps. And if we want to talk about helicopter parenting for a moment.
Vass Bednar [00:15:08] Sure.
Katina Michael [00:15:08] It's the constant surveillance of their children to the point of we know the train going by, why didn't you get on the train? And even adult children being asked these questions by the parents in studies we've conducted, when we've seen partnerships and just this constant wanting to know where someone is so that there's support and love and, you know, how did it go at the interview? And are you tired? And we may have hundreds of touch points per day in that context, which just strengthens the bond. But then we've had other situations wherein not so good relationships and perhaps those that are privy to domestic violence, sometimes, even when navigation map algorithms have changed, such as Google's map in 2014, their algorithm was changed, again back to Reddit and other public blogs, we reviewed hundreds of women's posts saying your app now doesn't work, and my husband or my partner thinks I've been cheating on them. And there have been repercussions.
Vass Bednar [00:16:13] Wow.
Katina Michael [00:16:14] And in the most heinous contexts, GPS's have been strapped to vehicles or phones have been accidentally forgotten in the boot of a car of somebody you don't know. The data we gathered and then a heinous crime taking place thereafter, many of which are now a case law, are extreme cases where harm has happened to the one who has been tracked. So we often talk about the trustor and the trustee, but in, in stranger contexts, there isn't any trustor or trustee.
Vass Bednar [00:16:44] Right.
Katina Michael [00:16:45] The one who's being tracked doesn't trust because they're unaware of the tracking. And in the old days, it wasn't bi directional sharing. So if I downloaded on your phone surreptitiously Google Latitude and you didn't pick up that the app was running in the background, I could look up where you were without your realization. After pressure being applied by academics like myself companies started to notify somebody when I look up had occurred, or every three weeks you would be pinged, 'do you still consent to your location being tracked?'.
Vass Bednar [00:17:18] Right.
Katina Michael [00:17:19] And sometimes there were wild surprises, particularly between parents and children. Some of the teenagers were 16 to 18 years of age and took up the matter with their parents. You know, if this is really how you want to treat me, you'll never trust me. And I thought you trusted me. And the can't be any quick fix after trust has been broken. You know, it takes a long time.
Vass Bednar [00:17:39] There's no app for that.
Katina Michael [00:17:40] There's no app for that.
Vass Bednar [00:17:42] There's been all sorts of really important reporting about these apps or these tracking technologies being used, as you mentioned, in alleged stalking incidents, incidents of violence. Do we know if location sharing actually does make us safer overall?
Katina Michael [00:17:59] The more we share, the more we make ourselves vulnerable. It's the paradox of security. The more secure allegedly our systems become, the more insecure we feel. And that's an amazing finding in our research because throwing technology at a problem doesn't make it better. It makes it worse depending on the context. So we talk about this in terms of insecurity distrust and vulnerability. And so that thing that we said would enhance our capabilities is eroding it. And sometimes it happens because it's not just the location data that is gathered. It's our physical activity data that's gathered. It could also be our vital signs and characteristics. So what direction I'm traveling in, but also my heart rate. And if I'm running or I'm on a train or I'm in a car or I've suddenly braked in the vehicle, but then who am I sharing that information with is so important to companies. Because the old adage is, you know, tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are.
Vass Bednar [00:19:04] Right. I guess the flip side of that is companies will tell us that we, in turn, benefit from sharing this information because we can receive, what, a more personalized price or a better targeted ad. There's a ton of money in the location sharing industry. Could you give us a bit of an overview of how those economics work?
Katina Michael [00:19:27] So nothing in life is free. Profit maximization is the number one thing followed by sales maximization. I know in the early days when I was looking at simply Amazon's partnerships, in the first few years of their development, they had 150 affiliates that they would share information with.
Vass Bednar [00:19:43] Wow.
Katina Michael [00:19:44] So there's obviously the business to business selling of your data, of which you're not gaining a cent, but you're giving over. And for some people they'll say, that's okay, you know, I've got nothing to hide and in fact, I want all the services that I'm engaged in to be optimal. I want them to optimize their knowledge of my location so that it's faster. For example, when I open an app, it knows that on Sundays I frequent certain venues. So it'll open looking for that venue so you can drive to that venue with your navigation on. And people like that chronicle and history and breadcrumb, because it's again, convenient. And if you trust the service, there's nothing wrong with it. But we're becoming a little bit blasé as consumers. Oh the app has asked for access to our contact list and our pictures and our audio. Okay, okay okay, okay. Because I really just want the app.
Vass Bednar [00:20:42] In 2022 according to the Pew Research Center, 69% of Gen Z and 77% of millennials said that they activated location sharing features on their phones at least some times. Do you see a generation gap in the uptake with these apps and technologies? Why do you think location sharing is so popular among younger people?
Katina Michael [00:21:06] It's a great question. I think in the early days location sharing was a default feature.
Vass Bednar [00:21:11] Right.
Katina Michael [00:21:11] So you didn't have to opt in. So I think many children using applications quite innocently have just continued to use applications without realizing the repercussions. And in fact, I think there's a generational gap, but only one that's based on lived experience. As we get older, perhaps we've been exposed to greater number of situations and contexts. We realize how location is one of those features and capabilities that is a discriminator. And this is the case with underrepresented minorities and also women in particular. So as we get older, we realize that knowing someone's physical location means that someone literally could knock on your door at home or actually stalk you in groups. There have been many middle aged men, for example, who have somehow crept into social networks of cheerleaders or a sports team and masqueraded as a child or a young teen. But everyone is oblivious because they're a friend of a friend, but they've never met these friends in person, so all of a sudden, a peeping Tom can travel around with the group, and the group is oblivious to the watching from afar or up close. Digital literacy is becoming increasingly important. We need schools from a young age, you know, even preschool to start educating.
Vass Bednar [00:22:39] I'm glad you mentioned preschool. We have a girlfriend who we tease because I think she stalks her son. Right? There's a live webcam that offers a stream all day of the main play area at her daycare, but she has trouble closing this tab. She has trouble focusing on work, and we're like, leave him alone. Let the little guy play. But I mean, how does that build that expectation between parent and child that you'll be able to kind of know where they are? Side note if my mom could have a live stream of stuff I was doing all the time, she'd probably tune in too. I don't blame her, but it's tough, right?
Katina Michael [00:23:16] It's tough. And we're not even waiting for preschool. We now have these nanny cams in hospitals after the birth of a child. So in the first week of a child's life, there is a cam stuck right on top streaming. And I understand, you know, grandparents may want to see the newborn, but they don't have to see it all the time. And in fact, as a mother of three, one of the most sacred things that I felt after giving birth to my kids is I was filled with joy and love for the human and not the technology. In fact, we didn't touch technology for the first week. We just wanted to smell the baby. Yeah, because the baby filled our life. Now the watching being normalized is dangerous, both for the self and the other. From the self perspective, we can talk about obsessive compulsive disorder. We can talk about taking risks. And children thrive when they risk taking. They don't thrive when they're controlled. And what we are doing is circumventing a child's independence. We're stealing their identity in some way, their development of who they are if we're constantly watching and then perhaps thinking we're correcting or otherwise. So I think it's dangerous. But I, I do understand that increasingly daycares all over the world are doing this. You know, it used to be when my kids were growing up, we maybe have a picture set at best, scrolling on the monitor so we could see how, you know, they were baking today or they were doing mud bricks outside. Today this live cam business and what we've seen is parents getting jealous over another child's capability in one activity. Like that's ridiculous. Between the ages of, you know, zero and five, when we start to compare and unfortunately, location sharing and the visual aspect with this notion of uberveillance that my husband developed as a term and is in the Oxford Dictionary, it's about identity, location and condition. And that fourth item is the image, the visual.
Vass Bednar [00:25:12] What is uberveillance?
Katina Michael [00:25:14] It's a kind of big brother on the inside looking out, you know, through CCTV or nanny cam or some cam device. But it's knowing all of these things about someone and then inferring what they're thinking. And the pitfalls of uberveillance really are misinformation, misrepresentation, information manipulation and really sending us down the wrong path. What we need is, as George Orwell noted, that which is inside our skull to remain private, so that we have that independence and autonomy. And what we don't want is to get into a world where there's so much surveillance that we can infer by what you're doing and where you are and who you're with, what you're thinking. And once we lose that which is inside the skull as the only private space we really have left today, what we're going to see is a fraying of ourselves and of the social fabric that ties societal members together. And that, to me, is dangerous.
Vass Bednar [00:26:17] How close are we to that danger? I know you've spoken about the allure of God view. Can you also explain that idea?
Katina Michael [00:26:25] Yes. So this God view, it's the all seeing eye, whether we have it through a CCTV or through our workplace surveillance capabilities. Like a pinhole camera that watches you when you turn on your laptop. Literally some organizations are doing that and you've signed over consent, and there's a policy denoting why, usually about security of something. But we are treading on dangerous territory when we want to know everything about everything all the time, because it means we're not giving people room to breathe. They're constantly on the grid. They're not allowed to disconnect. And what we're seeing now is tourist destinations marketing their location as being off the grid, that you kind of- it's a dead zone and people are flying to these places to enjoy some time out.
Vass Bednar [00:27:14] Increasingly it's sort of like a game. I notice that Find My Friends has this weird feature you can award one of your friends the Dot of the week.
Katina Michael [00:27:21] Well, it's all behavioral engineering Vass, and it's Pokemon Go on steroids. When we reward people for sharing more and the rewards are minuscule, you know, it's not like you're given money, but there's some kind of trophy. And we see that with sports and athletics and cycling. You know, I've got a smartwatch on right now and I use an app and I know where I go and which routes, and if I share that with the same demographic, then I can compare and compete, even if I'm not in the same city. So there's this gamification occurring, but it's nudge, right? That's what we call nudge factors. Well, if I can get you to do certain things, post a reward, you just probably give away a bit more.
Vass Bednar [00:28:03] You touched on how this is creeping into employment situations and kind of freaking workers out affecting how they're making decisions, what they're doing. Do you think the use of either these apps or again just this technology, this new expectation of default location sharing in our private lives is priming an entire workforce for this kind of electronic monitoring?
Katina Michael [00:28:27] Totally. And I would say that this was occurring early on, although the workforce was not aware. One of the earliest cases I studied around about 2006/7 was a case in the US where someone was claiming hours, they were a teacher, they were claiming hours that the teachers organization proved they never had engaged, because the handset that had been given by the state was trackable, and they never were in the area they were claiming money for. So there you go. That was one of the earliest case studies. You know, it can become quite suffocating in a work context when we have drivers who have four GPS's on average on a truck, and all they want to do is stop to have a quick ten minute nap. But their employer knows they've stopped the truck.
Vass Bednar [00:29:12] Right.
Katina Michael [00:29:13] And that truck is, you know, holding goods that can spoil if they don't reach their destination in time. I've known truck drivers who haven't stopped, even when they've felt their, you know, dental issues will explode while they're driving and they've had to just carry on with the pain and get to the other side because they don't want to be asked, why did you stop and this will cost you money. So the other thing that I realized at the time is that we equate objects to the same level as subjects. I now find my apps, you know, we're finding our left earbud, our right earbud, like could be our left arm and right. Yeah, our phone, our smartwatch. It's all connected. But on those circles are also human beings. And I tell you Vass, I think that people are having difficulty distinguishing between the asset and that human. And we've starting to treat the humans as if they're things. So I look up the person, but I don't actually realize I'm looking up a human being whose blood is pumping and has a brain. I just think they're an object because I can map them to a coordinate, or it's like mapping a car or an earbud, but these are not equatable. But the app, what it does, it sort of puts us on the same level playing ground. It flattens our structure, our hierarchy of needs, our hierarchy of importance. And I'm worried about that trend as well.
Vass Bednar [00:30:36] So given all your research and your reflection and your rooting as a professional kind of on the cutting edge of these technologies. Do you feel that the presumed benefits of location sharing are worth these costs? Privacy. Financial. Intellectual?
Katina Michael [00:30:56] I think location sharing has revolutionized business processes. They've transformed organizations and the amazing things that we can do through location sharing, when it's for the right purpose, is phenomenal. With scheduling, like companies like DHL measure 5000 hubs, sometimes of location points, to make sure that we get our goods delivered on time and in good condition. I never negate those positive benefits, but I'm increasingly concerned about the erosion of our privacy and our ability to be independent thinkers, to retain our human rights and our dignity. But we've almost abandoned our rights willingly at times for the service. And that is very hard to regain. You know, when I use my GPS to get somewhere, but I frequent that route every single day, and I'm doing it constantly, but I'm not really paying attention. I'm just listening like a drone to the direction.
Vass Bednar [00:31:59] Yeah.
Katina Michael [00:31:59] And I should know where my workplace is, shouldn't I? But a lot of people don't, you know, they work there for a year and it's 45 minutes away and they don't know how they got there. They just ask the GPS every day. But we're losing touch with the natural and physical locations. You know, I pass that very interesting temple or that bakery on the corner, or that person that's always out there every Sunday or every Monday with his group of friends playing basketball. We've lost touch with the relationship of our surrounds because we're just on autopilot, and I'm worried that we're losing that part of the conversation, which actually builds trust. When we trust systems to tell us where the other party is, you know that chit chat that we used to have on the phone, how do I get there? Where's this place? You know, which band's going to be playing at the pub? We're losing the chit chat. So it's just like, well, you're just an object on the map. And if I don't want to share with you, I won't. But where are the rules of engagement of two people or more in a group? Feeling a sense of belonging? That's not just about I will create this network and then tear it down. It's accountability.
Vass Bednar [00:33:05] You mentioned anxiety, going back to the 90s at Nortel, did you have feelings of anxiety related to the technology? Did you feel that there were the right rules in place to sort of anticipate where we've gotten to right now?
Katina Michael [00:33:22] I believe the tech sector and the telecommunications sector are responsible for the context of where we find ourselves. We just dreamed, we wanted intelligence services. We hoped that, I won't call it AI, but some intelligence service would support things like how do I get from Australia to China? And knowing that the trains were on time, that my plane was on time, that everything was interconnected and that these services, they would be interlinked and we would have this seamless capability to get from A to Z. I will say we were more preoccupied with things to do with profits and margins. And I can tell you now discussions really weren't about the customer, or you know, we did identify personas, but really the only talking point for customers was the average revenue per user. It was not about the wellbeing of the user. It was not a human centered design approach to building networks. The customer was a nebulous, vague identifier. It was just a variable in a spreadsheet. And I think that needs to be flipped on its side.
Vass Bednar [00:34:30] Hmhm.
Katina Michael [00:34:30] Users were just another dot on something. It was a unit. It wasn't even human. It was a dot on on on a spreadsheet, a count. And I do think we need to be more mindful and actually start thinking about humanity centered design. You know, in a perfect scenario, how should we be storing data and should it be sensitive and we just store data for 24 hours? If it's all we need, is the last 12 hours or the last one week why is a service perpetuating this sensitive data use? And really, we need to redesign or rethink how we do design so that we have more of these positive benefits. Because I do believe in location services, I just don't think we're building them the right way. It's the building they will come mentality that has always been there since the days of AT&T, but we need to move beyond that. I think we have now gotten to a point where we realize that is no longer enough. That is not the right approach to create innovative services, and I think we need to create real services for real people, not fake services for fake people that somehow are attracted by, you know, trends and patterns and feds. But increasingly we're just trying to make more money. And sure, that's the aim of most companies so there's employment and economic prosperity and innovation and patent generation. But really, if we want to talk sustainability in terms of humans and the planet, we've got to think about purpose before we think about profit. Profit is important, but purpose is more important.
Vass Bednar [00:36:05] From dots on a spreadsheet to dots on a map and our friends apps. Katina Michael, thank you so much for helping us locate ourselves in this evolving debate over sharing ourselves. Thank you.
Katina Michael [00:36:19] Thank you so much Vass.
Vass Bednar [00:36:33] You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany, and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Vass Bednar. And in our show notes, you can subscribe to the newsletter where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.