LifeLog was a project of the
Information Processing Techniques Office
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research",Lyon, Matthew; Hafner, Katie (1999-08-19). ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'' (p. 39). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. was par ...
of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the
U.S. Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secur ...
(DOD). According to its bid solicitation pamphlet in 2003, it was to be "an
ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...
-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".
Goals and capabilities
LifeLog aimed to compile a massive electronic
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
of every activity and relationship a person engages in. This was to include credit card purchases, web sites visited, the content of telephone calls and e-mails sent and received, scans of faxes and postal mail sent and received, instant messages sent and received, books and magazines read, television and radio selections, physical location recorded via wearable GPS sensors, biomedical data captured through wearable sensors. The high level goal of this data logging was to identify "preferences, plans, goals, and other markers of intentionality".
[PIP 03-30](_blank)
, DARPA's bid solicitation for LifeLog (now offline) at the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
Another of DARPA's goals for LifeLog had a predictive function. It sought to “find meaningful patterns in the timeline, to infer the user’s routines, habits, and relationships with other people, organizations, places, and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task"
Generically, the term ''lifelog'' or ''flog'' is used to describe a storage system that can automatically and persistently record and archive some informational dimension of an object's (object lifelog) or user's (user lifelog) life experience in a particular data category.
News reports in the media described LifeLog as the "diary to end all diaries—a multimedia, digital record of everywhere you go and everything you see, hear, read, say and touch".
According to U.S. government officials, LifeLog is not connected with DARPA's
Total Information Awareness.
[
The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 after criticism concerning the privacy implications of the system.][{{Cite web, title=15 Years Ago, the Military Tried to Record Whole Human Lives. Badly, url=https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbqdb8/15-years-ago-the-military-tried-to-record-whole-human-lives-it-ended-badly, access-date=2020-08-01, website=www.vice.com, language=en, date=21 May 2018]
See also
* Information Processing Techniques Office
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research",Lyon, Matthew; Hafner, Katie (1999-08-19). ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'' (p. 39). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. was par ...
* Information Awareness Office
The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology ...
* Lifelogging
A lifelog is a personal record of one's daily life in a varying amount of detail, for a variety of purposes. The record contains a comprehensive dataset of a human's activities. The data could be used to increase knowledge about how people liv ...
* Surveillance
* Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
References
DARPA
2004 disestablishments in the United States
Year of establishment missing
Abandoned military projects of the United States
Military intelligence
Privacy in the United States
Privacy controversies and disputes