LIFELOG DEAD

The Pentagon has pulled the plug on LifeLog, its stun­ningly ambi­tious effort to build a data­base track­ing a person’s entire exis­tence.
Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a sin­gle place just about every­thing an indi­vid­ual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the mag­a­zines read, the plane tick­ets bought, the e-​​mail sent and received. Out of this seem­ingly end­less ocean of infor­ma­tion, com­puter sci­en­tists would plot dis­tinc­tive routes in the data, map­ping rela­tion­ships, mem­o­ries, events and expe­ri­ences.
LifeLog’s back­ers said the all-​​encompassing diary could have turned into a near-​​perfect dig­i­tal mem­ory, giv­ing its users com­put­er­ized assis­tants with an almost flaw­less recall of what they had done in the past. But civil lib­er­tar­i­ans imme­di­ately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, argu­ing that LifeLog could become the ulti­mate tool for pro­fil­ing poten­tial ene­mies of the state.
Researchers close to the project say they’re not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn’t pro­vided an expla­na­tion for LifeLog’s quiet can­cel­la­tion. “A change in pri­or­i­ties” is the only ratio­nale agency spokes­woman Jan Walker pro­vided.
However, related Darpa efforts con­cern­ing soft­ware sec­re­taries and mechanical brains are still moving ahead as planned.
LifeLog is the latest in a series of controversial programs that have been canceled by Darpa in recent months. The Terrorism Information Awareness, or TIA, data-mining initiative was eliminated by Congress -- although many analysts believe its research continues on the classified side of the Pentagon's ledger. The Policy Analysis Market, which provided a stock market of sorts for people to bet on terror strikes, was almost immediately withdrawn after its details came to light in July.
“Darpa’s pretty gun-​​shy now,” added Lee Tien, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been crit­i­cal of many agency efforts. “After TIA, they dis­cov­ered they weren’t ready to deal with the firestorm of crit­i­cism.“
My Wired News arti­cle has details on LifeLog’s can­cel­la­tion.
THERE’S MORE: LifeLog may be dead, but Darpa still has plenty of creepy data-​​mining pro­grams, the BBC notes.

Imagine being able to pin­point someone’s loca­tion any­where in the world sim­ply by typ­ing a few key­words on your PC. That is what soft­ware partly funded by the US mil­i­tary is try­ing to do.
The MetaCarta pro­gram works by analysing thou­sands of doc­u­ments and cross-​​checking the results with a mas­sive geo­graph­i­cal data­base…
The soft­ware auto­mat­i­cally extracts geo­graphic ref­er­ences from text doc­u­ments such as e-​​mails or web­pages. Millions of doc­u­ments can be searched using key­words, place names or a time ref­er­ence. Search results appear as points on a map instead of as a list of doc­u­ments. The com­pany says this infor­ma­tion can be used, for exam­ple, to track pat­terns of crim­i­nal activ­ity and iden­tify spots of intensity. 

(via /​.)

February 4th, 2004 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.