I appreciate the idea that innovation is all around us. Technology is always changing and it’s nice to have information at my fingertips whenever I need it. I often wonder how I was able to get by without a GPS maps function on my phone.
Despite the excess data on our phones at present, developers are always looking for new ways to provide even more for us. I understand that it may be helpful, but at what point do we step back and question the necessity of such things?
Behavio is a new start-up that’s received awards from Google and at the SXSW festival for its Android platform that aims to give consumers the type of insight I mention above. The company aims to tap “smart sensor” information from smartphones and use it to give consumers control over their own data and for entities to gain actionable insight into trends in both individuals and communities. They claim this will make consumer’s lives more productive. In the picture below, Behavio shows the type of data they can obtain using the smart sensor- all of which is already being picked up by your phone whether you know or not. By streamlining this data into an interface like the one below, individuals will be able to explore data about their own lives. Other entities will too.
Behavio has all the makings of an honest, youthful tech startup. They even promise to obtain and use data ethically and to ask for consent from users before going forward with certain functions, which all sounds nice in a utopia. Maybe it’s because I’m learning about Behavio on the same day I’ve learned that Facebook is inserting political posts into users’ newsfeeds, but I doubt the public will have any trust in a concept like this.