Autonomous, Consent Driven and Generative Device, System and Method That Promotes User Privacy, Self-Knowledge and Well-Being [Filed May 23, 2025]
Background
In the economy of the modern mobile device, the most valuable commodity is the human user, and the data generated from and by each user. This most valuable commodity is generally provided by the user for free and, in some cases, the user even pays for some goods or service while providing this valuable data for free.
An individuals' well-being and self-knowledge depend on one another. “The examined life” is one of man's greatest gifts. It helps a person improve themself by being conscious of themself, becoming aware of their patterns of thinking and acting, their way of conducting themself in the world. If an individual does this diligently, they can become aware of behaviors that may thwart the advancement of their own life, and the lives of fellow human beings.
Smart technology has not enriched this project. Although mobile devices were promoted with the promises that they would make lives better, provide autonomy, give access to more knowledge, enable one to make better use of time and energy, and allow one to fulfill their potential, these promises have been broken; technology has complicated the world without adding to human wisdom, and so have made one more dangerous to themself. Technology has magnified individuals' impulses while reducing the forces of time, distance and difficulty that regulate them. It has made one's thinking more dissociative and distractible, and made sociability more narcissistic and less intimate. It had multiplied possibilities so much that often one cannot make choices soundly. It has created so many competing stories that one cannot tell which are real. It has created so many self-appointed authorities that one does not know which to trust. Through mobile devices, the world looks like a funhouse of refracted light and mirrors. It moves through an individual so rapidly, that one must work harder just to stay in one place. So individuals feel burnout instead of progress, a sense of futility, and frustration about the whole situation: all of this technological abundance could be helping humanity, if only one knew how to harness it.
The idea of the human being has somehow become smaller. Humans have been capable of great feats throughout history. Humans built mind palaces of memory, and opened vast spaces inside to explore and create. But as the smartphone has rooted itself, it has made it harder to separate oneself as human being from technological appendages [Konok, V., Pogány, Á. and Miklósi, Á., 2017. Mobile attachment: Separation from the mobile phone induces physiological and behavioural stress and attentional bias to separation-related stimuli. Computers in Human Behavior, 71, pp. 228-239]. The mobile device—in particular the smartphone, has become humanity's default way of idling, socializing, and solving problems. When an individual is caught without their mobile device(s), they feel severed from themself. This dependence is reflexive, and often gives a constant feeling of anxiety, of being powerless and naked, on their own. Even when an individual is aware of its dangers, one usually cannot bring themself to act; as one does not feel that they have any alternative to choose. Humans live in this double bind, and it makes an individual feel less like a human being and more like a restless beast. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously warned, technology is not fitting into the frame of the human being; the individual is being remade to fit into its frame, and is finding themself shrinking in the process [Heidegger, Martin. “The question concerning technology.” (1993)].
Through humanity's use of apps, subscriptions, and various commercial activities on mobile devices, personal data is extracted from individuals. Many of the most intimate details of personal lives—health, habits, hobbies, moods, taste in food, art and sex—are given to parties that do not care for individuals or humanity, that then use or sell the data to others to manipulate or nudge human behavior to sell their products or favored political candidates or positions. In return, individuals receive the convenience from the use of various apps, but lose the benefit of the knowledge that could be gleaned from the individuals' data. If aggregated, this knowledge could be powerful, and frightening. An individual's browser histories can reveal the objects of one's interests and desires; keystrokes and speech patterns can reveal one's process of thinking; one's movements can reveal habits, good and bad; and one's biometrics can indicate their heath and temperament. It is now possible to create models and profiles of a person with these trackable metrics, as though humans were naturalists observing a foreign species. One can image a person's physical state, their mental state, and the patterns that make up their life and relationships.
Patterns derived from personal data, meta-data and context are sensitive, and very revealing. If made available to other parties, they leave a person exposed to shame, theft, reductive profiling, manipulation, and a myriad of other harms. This is the environment one finds themself in: a landscape rife with data brokerage and breaches of privacy. Laws around the world have failed to keep up with this problem and provide adequate safeguards. The intuitive significance of privacy has not been properly translated into humanity's ethical consciousness, much less into public policy. And so, the aforementioned double bind: people are both anxious about technology and utterly incapable of choosing against it. This is why privacy is a pivotal concern, not merely to protect a person from concrete harm, but from the psychological danger of being watched. An individuals' digital world is now an extension of the individuals' home. They are their bedrooms, their bathrooms, their living rooms. The presence of interloping eyes affects one's sense of solitude. It affects how honestly one is able to look at oneself, how directly one is able to talk to oneself. How does one ensure that one's data cannot be breached by the outside observer, and give the person the space to breathe and see themself clearly?
One must consider the nature of human data. How should one understand its meaning? Can one frame it in a philosophical way? Finding the right metaphor is often useful for taming technologies. For example, data has often been called the “new oil.” Consider this metaphor, and find some revealing features: a crude, flammable resource, something finite and possessable; hardly the best symbol to reflect the fruits of the human spirit. Now consider an alternative metaphor: sunshine. The human being is not just a source of energy, but also of intelligibility—they are a source of light, voice, vision and meaning. The sun is an ancient symbol in philosophy and religious life, a proxy for the limitless part of reality and humanity. It cannot be completely known, or completely tamed. But it gives off a radiance that, if cultivated in modest ways, can be used to light the darker corners of life. Mirrors can light up a room by diffusing a single source of sunlight, without extinguishing that light, or being equal to it. If human data is oil, then the human being can effectively be used up, owned by another party, or put to waste. If data is like sunshine, then each human being is an end in themself, and cannot be exhausted. The data they give off can shed light back on themself without being confused for themself. A mirror does not know the feeling of the sun on its face, but it can still be made to reflect the light, so a person can see themself by the very light they cast. Instead of the funhouse, what if technology could become a reflective surface to harness the interpretive power of one's data and direct it to those places that need one's attention? What insight would become possible for humans, as individuals and as a species, if humans learned to direct data in this way?
An individual creates personal data every time they use their devices and the sensors inside it—when they move, when they speak, type words, take pictures, use apps or talk with centralized large language models on the internet—they are constantly creating Original Personal Data (OPD). Digital devices they use every day, fitted with eyes (cameras), ears (mic), and many other sophisticated sensors (touch, motion, location, etc) are now contributing to constantly learning the user, their digital activity and physical surroundings. Where they are, what they're doing and how fast is their heart racing, are all precisely knowable simultaneously, giving away their deeply Personal Context, derived from the OPD and meta-data, that even the users are not aware of themselves.
Given how much time one spends with, around or in front of the devices (way more than human relatives and friends) it is easily possible to gather one's Ongoing Personal Context (OPC) by learning, analyzing, assessing, or inferring from their OPD and attached meta-data.
While use of connected electronics is at an all-time high—both, intra and inter-user, the user's privacy, safety and security is degrading faster than ever before, making the users vulnerable to theft, breaches, bullshit and burnout. User's and their families find themselves constantly running on a treadmill of technology, becoming more difficult to understand and rapidly evolving, resulting in quintessential double-bind—can't slow down and can't keep up.
User's OPD and OPC are being shaped as the necessary oil to fuel the growth of hyper-personalized digital services in the field of LLM driven AI and its ability to reach AGI.
A great many studies have shown that misery, depression, loneliness, and addiction are at an all-time high. Much of the growth in these adverse human conditions stems from the isolation and stress caused by society's extreme use of electronics, and particularly the use of personal mobile devices. As such, users are constantly providing extremely valuable data to providers of mobile device services, and further paying providers of mobile device services, in exchange for constant increases in negative feelings and emotions.
Moreover, the prevalent use of mobile devices, and the online society that mobile devices enable, often negates any feelings of happiness, achievement and success. For example, each success in life, such as a promotion at a job, graduation from a school, or the buying of a new car, simply elicits comparison to others online. When a mobile device user's family goes on a wonderful vacation to a 3 star hotel in Florida, only to see via app-postings that their neighbors have gone on a far more exotic vacation at a 5 star hotel in Bali, the mobile device user cannot help but feel like her great vacation was a failure, and that she is lesser than her neighbors for having taken her family on that lesser vacation. Accordingly, even successes feel like failures for most users nowadays, and, instead of being celebrated, each new success leaves users wanting more and even greater success to “keep up with the Joneses”.
Of course, this problem is exacerbated by the issue that much of what is posted in the online universe afforded by modern mobile devices is exaggerated by the poster, or worse yet is completely untrue. As such, the pervasive feelings of inadequacy and failure experienced by many users are, in reality, based on untruths told by other users to remedy their own feelings of inadequacy and failure.
In our modern mobile device driven society, one's emotional state and sense of self-worth are often dictated by what one sees in the online universe available on mobile devices. That is, the mobile device technology that was created to serve human-kind has now, in essence, enslaved the emotions and well-being of human kind.
Yet further, the mobile device makers and the app-providers, because they are dependent on the free data provided by users for profit, are incentivized to enhance this enslavement, rather than remedy it. Thereby, powerful devices that were initially created to enhance human wisdom, to make humans more efficient and more wise, and to entertain humans, have now led to a universe in which entities profit from human misery and addiction centered on those same powerful devices. And this profit is based on the free data that users provide, and that those profiting entities receive, with those entities capturing and manipulating only that free data that serves their profitability, rather than making any use of data that might solve the increases in human misery and addiction.