Abstract
We are aware of the scale of data generated by wearable biometric sensors. Focusing on this technology, Deborah Lupton examines the far-reaching implications for the human person who is the data subject.
There is much to say in this regard: Does the device not bring the wearer to a level of dependence the way smartphones are inextricably strapped to one’s consciousness? After all, one’s wellness and wholeness depend on what the algorithms of these devices churn out about the body. Will these digital “strappings” be another signature artefact of our age?
Lupton’s book extols the admittedly promising gifts to personal health and well-being brought about (and promised) by the burgeoning technology that sees the human body as a fleshy machine—precise and predictable to a certain point in its biological clock.
With that perspective, the human subject is just another node on the Internet of Things. This prospect hovers throughout the book’s discourse as the author brings the reader into the inner workings of these digital monitors—describing what is done with harvested wearer data, where the data trove goes, who uses the data, and for what purposes.
The problem is the technology interfaces with the Internet of Things which, in the words of Greenfield (2017), is “a security nightmare” (p. 44). This reality raises serious privacy concerns, as the author explains. If these concerns are well-founded, what we will see is that there is a price to pay for this technology. In what turns out to be a “patient participatory culture,” the patient pays an enormous price and it behooves the makers of the technology, the service providers, public regulators, and citizen advocates to make sure that the privacy risks are managed in a manner that befits the basic entitlements of any human person.
The most challenging part of the book’s discourse is where the author sees that “unlike the allegedly subjective information that people receive from their senses and through observations, digital data carry with them an aura of scientific authority” (p. 56).
We might concede that sort of authority much too far. The main task of collecting data is meaningless in the abstract, without the human context to each quantified human subject. While the human physique has machine-like physiological systems, it is not all tissue, bone, and neural connection. Embedded in those systems are unquantifiable human emotions, thoughts, fears, attitudes, dreams, ideals that make up the complex context of the human person who is being quantified. These unquantifiable elements work their way into the human physical vortex in perpetual and dynamic movement. This explains why some persons degenerate despite being situated in what is an otherwise functioning body system, while others surmount what seems to be an insurmountable physical disorder. Prudence tells the data gatherer (and the data subject) not to be entirely bewitched by a mathematical ex machina.
As though riding on the issue, the author sees that “the human computer, in its inevitably fleshly humanness, can never achieve the capabilities offered by real digitised technologies” (p. 94).
There’s the rub: the human person will always be “flesh and blood” more than simply a measurable and predictable automaton. Machines and their algorithms tap a subject, not an object. That is why, according to O’Neil (2016), “we have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms, creating big data models that follow our ethical lead” (p. 204).
In the agitation of quantifying the human physique, we could lose touch with the humanity of the quantified person, mistaking numeric/mathematical representations and models for real life. As explained by Madsbjerg (2017), “algorithmic thinking exists in a no-man’s land of information stripped of its specificity” (p. 6). Admittedly, the author describes the human body as a “computerised information system” (p. 69), citing as an example the Apple Watch haptic technology. Precisely. The device’s probity could never be deeper than a tap. Wholeness is more than just algorithmic. That would not truly be whole. The human person is more than just an algorithmic entity.
It is, however, comforting that towards the end of the book, by surmounting the added sense of novelty of the device and the subtle sophistication exuded by its wearer, the author makes us understand that the data subject of these savvy novelties is a person with innate dignity and rights, not simply a body whose vibrations are recorded, rated, stored, studied, parsed, and shared in an interface of networks. It is more than just a harvest of 1s and 0s.