The trouble with everyone being connected and quantified isn’t only that we’re sharing, intentionally or otherwise, so much personal information, but also what that data can further reveal once algorithms have had their way with it. It’s like an inverse game of telephone in the Smartphone Age, the information becoming more precise as it travels.

From “You Are Your Phone,” a sharp Rough Type post by Nicholas Carr:

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Silicon Valley lending startups are looking to base personal loan decisions on analyses of data from individuals’ phones. The apps running on a person’s device, entrepreneurs have found, “generate huge amounts of data — texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social-media posts, retail receipts, and so on — indicating thousands of subtle patterns of behavior that correlate with repayment or default.” How you use your phone reveals more than you think:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.

Meanwhile, the New York Times today reports on a new study published in Science that reveals how a person’s economic status can be determined through a fairly simple analysis of phone use. The researchers, working in Africa, collected details “about when calls were made and received and the length of the calls” as well as “when text messages were sent, and which cellphone towers the texts and calls were routed through.” They analyzed this metadata to “build an algorithm that predicts how wealthy or impoverished a given cellphone user is. Using the same model, the researchers were able to answer even more specific questions, like whether a household had electricity.”

I am not a number, you declare. I am more than a credit score. You may well be. But the tell-tale phone reveals more than one’s financial standing and trustworthiness.•