How do you build trust for a device that collects data from people who never opted in?
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We launched Trailsense today. It counts hikers by fingerprinting wifi probe requests, no cameras, no raw data leaving the node.
The technical side of this felt solved once we had the anonymization right. But it's still a device in the woods listening for signals from every phone that walks by, whether that phone's owner knows it or not.
How would you feel about the fact that your data is being picked up like this? Has anyone here built something similar, sensors picking up data from people with no way to opt in? How could we earn trust rather than feel like a mass surveillance product?
We are curious what's worked, or what would make you trust us.
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honestly i don't think the anonymization is the part that earns trust, it's whether people even knew the node was there. invisible-but-privacy-respecting still reads as surveillance because "invisible" is doing the scary work, not "data collection." the thing that would actually change how i feel about it: a visible tag or sign on the physical node itself saying what it does and linking to a one-page explanation, right there on the trail, not buried in an app store listing nobody reads. same data, same anonymization, but now it's disclosed in the place where the sensing actually happens instead of only in your marketing. have you considered that as step one before the trust-building gets more elaborate?
Hey again @galdayan, thank you a lot for your insight!
This is a very good point, especially the part about disclosure needing to happen at the node itself rather than in marketing somewhere nobody reads. We have been thinking about signage at trailheads, to inform people the nodes exist. The idea would be to have signs at the start of hiking trails or at parking spots or wherever we can ensure that most of the hikers are going to pass. That way everybody knows what is happening and your idea of linking to a one pager where everything is explained simply is great. Might be cool to do it with an infographic to really make it understandable regardless of who's reading it.
We also already have an extra feature we have developed that we want to use. Basically we call it "Lens," a QR code we'll place on top of each node that any hiker can scan to open a simple webpage confirming it's an original node, along with the approximate location where it should be. We wanted to add this for transparency and to let people verify the nodes are authentic, but I think it would be great to combine it with your suggestion and redirect to an explainer page as well.
@frungu trailhead signage plus Lens actually cover two different problems, not one. signage answers "did I know this was here" and Lens answers "is this the real thing or someone's rogue node." both matter but they're not interchangeable, a hiker could see a sign, trust it, and still walk past a spoofed node with no sign at all. so I'd put Lens as verification for the skeptical minority and the sign as the thing that has to work for everyone else who never scans anything. good that you're not treating either as the whole answer.
@galdayan that's fair, and you're right they're not interchangeable. Thinking about it, Lens might be more useful for trail maintenance staff checking a node is legitimate than for hikers second-guessing a sign, though it could still help hikers too. The signs need to work for everyone, especially the people who'll never scan a code.