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August 20, 2007
Fancy name tag motivates you to attend sessions (just one more surveillance technology)
Alarm:Clock ran a story recently about a new high-tech name badge designed to motivate conference goers to attend sessions and more.
Alarm:Clock says . . .
The badges automatically record brownie points for attendees when they accomplished a task such as going to a session, completing a survey, or visiting an exhibit booth.
As much as I love persuasion, this sounds too heavy handed to be a successful product. Who wants to be subjected to surveillance at a conference, even if you do get points?
Perhaps nTag has figured out a nice way to sugarcoat the surveillance. The tag apparently does things besides track your location. To be sure, with persuasive technology the details make the difference between "love it" and "hate it." When it comes to nTag, the VCs apparently "love it": The company has just raised another $8.3M, bringing their total to $21M.
That's a lot of cash for wearable surveillance. But we shouldn't be surprised: surveillance has long been big business. The nTag product is a small data point in a pattern of surveillance. (A huge data point is those new mobile phones we're buying that can pinpoint our location, all in the name of 911 safety.)
The 2007 Gold Medal for Surveillance should go to the Chinese government. Earlier this month, the New York Times ran this lead:
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.
Unfortunately, we're becoming a surveillance society. We're creating technology to track people's location in order to change their behaviors. But here's the weirdest part: Most people seem okay with the growing level of surveillance in our lives. Well, I'm not.
Some forms of persuasion are good, some are bad, and some can be both. Surveillance is almost always bad. In writing my book on persuasive technology I looked hard to find an example of helpful surveillance. I found one. But it wasn't easy. Using surveillance to change behavior should always raise red flags.
BJ Fogg
Director, Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab
Posted by BJ Fogg at August 20, 2007 06:01 PM