Big Data, Plainly Spoken (aka Numbers Rule Your World)

How surveys mislead

I just filled out an online survey after a positive interaction with an online chat representative (a human) because I wanted to give him a thumbs up.

The survey was (to my relief) relatively short, so kudos to the design team. Sometimes, filling out these surveys gives the impression of a gift that keeps on giving - the more answers you give them, the more time they presume they can take from your schedule!

The last question of this survey has me spooked. It asked me to rate whether it was easy to find the support I needed.

I gave them a low score because like every other online service, despite paying a subscription fee, they put up a lot of barriers between me and the human rep. The button to get to a human is buried miles deep. The automated query engine that supposedly finds relevant support articles so I can "self-help" is embarrassingly juvenile - it always feels like using Google where they present a bunch of links that are just basic keyword matches. Whoever designs these systems fail to recognize that I am one of those people who contact them after having wasted time searching through their support documents. 

Gone are the days where you have a one-click access to an online support rep.

What I realized is the support team will never get the above feedback from me. Why? Because the designers of the survey ensures that this will not happen. The survey gives me a choice of five reasons why I gave them the (poor) rating for the ease of finding support. These reasons are things like the number of transfers between reps or channels, the waiting time to get a rep, and so on. None of these capture my grievance, and there isn't an "other" option or a text box. So I picked none of them, and finished the survey.

***

The point of this quick note is that more surveys are being conducted now than ever before, because the online medium has drastically lowered the cost of collecting responses. However, a lot of these surveys will not give the marketing team the useful data they're hoping to get because they aren't designed to do so.

I won't get into the politics of this in this post. I'd just say that it's not necessarily incompetence. It might be intentional.

***

What are some of the positive things I wanted to say about that service interaction?

Once I got the online chat open, I was directly added to a queue for a human rep - there wasn't this nonsense of throwing even more bots at me that offer more nonsensical search results. The other day, I was on a different chatbot who boldly proclaimed that it doesn't understand my wish to "connect me to a human representative". It didn't tell me it couldn't do this, it claimed that it couldn't understand what I wanted, and asked me to rephrase my question. And it repeated the same response for each rephrasing I tried until I quit.

Also, the rep made a short video clip that shows a simulation of my account pages when demonstrating how to do something. This visual aid helps a lot compared to just chat messenges.

The rep was also quite patient as I tried to steer the conversation towards the precise problem I was having, and away from the general problem. Eventually, he resolved all my questions. Bravo!

Know your data 40: omnipresent listening

Apple markets itself as the tech giant that is most protective of user privacy. One reason to believe this claim is that unlike all the other tech companies, Apple charges premium prices for its products and is not as reliant on advertising as its revenue source. Nothing in this post disputes this assertion although we will wonder how low the bar is to quality as "most".

Apple recently settled out of court a lawsuit that alleges that Apple's Siri secretly records people's conversations, then extracts "insights" which are sold to advertising customers. It's a scenario that most of us recognize is possible, and perhaps many of us thought couldn't possibly be happening, not on an Apple device.

The allegation is that some users were delivered "eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden".

***

Of course, any interactive technology requires the tech to capture the user's instructions or reactions and thus we expect the tech to be recording, whether it's audio or video. This is true of Siri, other voice assistants, any home devices you can interact with, gaming and TV monitors, etc.

So, if one chooses to use these features, one should expect omnipresent listening.

Just think about the idea that "Hey, Siri" is used to activate Siri. If the phone is not constantly listening to you, how does it pick up "Hey, Siri"?

The concern is really about the lack of user control, or the disrespect of user intention (what has been euphemistically called "unintentional" here). I laugh every time the word "unintentional" is used. There is almost nothing that is unintentional in tech. The recording has to be triggered by some instruction and that instruction is written up in the code, a deliberate act. It's possible that the recording is set to be universal regardless of user intention or controls but that's not what is being admitted.

The allegation is that Siri was supposed to record conversations only if the user utters the words "Hey Siri" but in fact, conversations were (sometimes) recorded even when those words were not spoken.

Further, one doesn't typically hand over entire recordings to advertisers. The recordings must be turned into transcripts, then insights are extracted (e.g. person A mentioned brand X), the person A has to be identified so that the advertiser can send ads to that person's devices, etc.

The amount of code needed to execute the entire targeted advertising program, starting with recording the conversations and ending with delivering the ads, is substantial and involved. In my view, if such code exists, it is intentional.

***

It just so happens that while I was writing this up, a friend called me up and told me that his Instagram (that's a Facebook property) started flooding him with ads from a particular VPN brand after he recently asked me for VPN recommendations. He was quite alarmed and annoyed. He said he only wrote down the recommended names on a notepad so the only way Instagram knows we talked about that vendor would be through listening to our phone call.

That scenario is certainly possible but hard to prove since there is so little transparency when it comes to technology. In fact, any number of trackers may be collecting the data, which eventually find their way to Instagram.

Without whistleblowers or discovery, it's challenging to prove the case against Apple in court. But since Apple is settling, we might not hear about this again.

 

 

On the second day of congestion pricing...

Here comes the most predictable story of the AI revolution in toll collection. Drivers are evading tolls, stupid! (link)

Since Sunday, New York City has imposed tolls for driving into midtown and downtown Manhattan, which can potentially reduce the volume of traffic, and thus pollution in the city. They call it “congestion pricing,” which is a misnomer, since the price is not zero when there is zero congestion (the toll is $2.25 for passenger cars after 9 pm).

In any case, "congestion pricing" is powered by omnipresent surveillance, as AI image recognition technology is used to recognize car license plates, and then via a database lookup to establish their identities, the car owners are sent bills. You need lots of cameras all over the city to make this possible. According to this report (link), they installed 1,400 cameras in 110 “detection points”.

It used to be that cars lined up to pass by toll booths where each driver must hand over cash to the human toll collector before the car was allowed to pass through. This means drivers paid first, then used the roads. Then came AI image recognition technology, which snaps photos of cars, extracting the license plate numbers, and via a database lookup, sends bills to people’s homes. As a result, drivers get to use the toll roads first, and pay later.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that one can’t get charged if the AI failed to discover one’s license plate number. One can use any number of ways to obscure the license plate, or not even show it. One can fake the plate numbers, or simply cover it up. It appears that the toll evasion problem is so serious that on the second day of congestion pricing, NYC officials have proposed new rules to crack down on such tactics.

The next thing they will discover is more revenue leakage – what proportion of plate numbers are incorrectly read, what proportion of bills are sent to the wrong addresses, and what proportion of people don’t pay the bills.

***

On a related matter, my own experience is that banks are trusting the handwriting recognition software used by ATMs to read checks less and less; I feel like more and more, I'm asked to enter the amount manually, which suggests that the software is not sure about the number, or that the banks are extra cautious. 

Was Debrina Kawam homeless?

The New York Times published a short entry on the life of one Debrina Kawam, the woman burned alive while sleeping in a New York subway car recently (link).

In the initial reporting, the victim was described as "homeless" but eventually, when she was identified, the police used language that suggests otherwise: they said she had a "brief stint" in the New York homeless shelter system. This CNN article even said:

The victim was initially believed to have been homeless, which complicated efforts to identify her, law enforcement sources previously told CNN.

The NYT reporter added details, saying:

In the fall of last year, Kawam was homeless. After an outreach team encountered her at Grand Central Terminal, she entered the New York City shelter system and was assigned to a facility in the Bronx. But she never showed up.

***

Since I have been digging into how the U.S. HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) counts the homeless population (here, here), Kawan's case presents an opportunity to put our knowledge to practice.

If she had been alive in late January, she would have been found by the homeless counting team to have been sleeping in the subway system, which means she is part of the "unsheltered" homeless. If she had registered with the assigned Bronx shelter, she would have been counted as "sheltered homeless."

Thus, the reporting that suggests she was not homeless at the time of her death appears inaccurate.

 

P.S. Another tidbit from the NYT article was her futile attempt to find her mother in New Jersey. If her mother had allowed her to stay even temporarily, Kawam would not be included in the homeless count (neither in New York nor in NJ) as this situation fits one of the exclusion criteria set out in the HUD Guide.