Overview

The  Emotion Data Protection Project was founded by Deborah Hurley and Jocelyn Scheirer in Fall 2019.  Its purpose is to provide a clearinghouse for information related to emotion data and privacy, and to serve as the only known organization devoted solely to this topic.

Until quite recently,  the technology necessary to sense physiological or mental state of a person was in the realm of science fiction.   But over the past ten years, wearable fitness devices with heart rate monitors, accelerometers and location sensors have become commonplace, allowing massive amounts of data from the wild to be captured and stored --- giving machine learning engineers the ability to create algorithms that predict states such as depression and anxiety.  Companies now trade their employees’ data for discounts on health insurance.  Recently the country of Singapore made a deal with Fitbit for 5.7 million devices for an opt-in program, and Google recently acquired Fitbit.  This unprecedented access of governments and corporations to current and stockpiled years of human data will no doubt bring a new era of smart machines that can detect nuances in physiological stress.   

We believe we should keep up with this change, in order to inform the public and policy makers.  There are centers and projects devoted to data privacy all over the world, but none are focused specifically on emotion data. 

 

We are planning a Workshop for early 2020s and papers to follow.  

 

 

 

For more information please email jcsmedia@jcsmediaconsulting.com