Social media has arrived and the Facebook generation is much more aware about privacy issues and rights regarding personal data. Just think about the recent uproar caused when Facebook tried to update its privacy policy; a decision it had to swiftly recant, removing the controversial clause.The truth is privacy on the web is a big deal but not only in the case of Facebook and other similar social networking sites. In fact many other companies capture and have access to our data, including the usual suspects - email providers, search engines, photo sharing sites etc.

If you are paranoid about your privacy then now is a good time to reassess exactly what information is private to you, because the boundaries might soon shift. Researchers Nitesh Dhanjani and Akshay Aggarwal have been researching how your online persona and activity can actually be used to hack into your psyche for intelligence-gathering and even as a way to influence your behaviour.

The two researchers are developing a “proof of concept” prototype that will be able to collect feeds from your online presence. It will extract “emotionally rich” data from the various social media tools you use and display all that information in a single dashboard interface - forming a type of “emotional dashboard”. Just think how often you update your Facebook profile, feed blogger, or Tweet? Every time you engage with social media tools you communicate information about yourself to others. A lot of the times this information is meant to be shared with friends and close acquaintances, it is informal, personal, and expressive. All this information is rich with emotion detail and context that can be extracted, correlated and extrapolated to construct your psychological/emotional profile.  It is the aggregation of all the emotional clues and traces you leave behind, mapped over time, within a particular period, that is used to paint the picture of your emotional present.

Let me give you a senario, if a user twitters, “9.45 still raining dogs! bored numbless considered suicide but lack motivation to carry it out effectively” certain keywords in your tweet will be extracted and referenced to your active data stream. The proof of concept dash board may interpret this information and display a grey hue (or dark purple if you are an artist type) or some othe signifier, to project your current emotional state.

Colour is an effective way to display emotion and mood, in fact one of the inspirations for the proof of concept is WeFeelFine.org , a project that explored human emotion through a data collection engine that manually assigned over 200 “feeling colours” that loosely correspond to the tone of feeling. The prototype concept will be based on Microsoft’s Silverlight Media - a programmable web browser plugin that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback. This will allow the dashboard to display dynamic rich data, and color variations, with real time mood and emotion updates.

There are obvious implications for a psychological analysis dashboard. In fact, I believe that red would be the most visible colour on the net, painted with people`s outrage, apprehension and privacy concerns.  However, if we are able to sidetrack the obvious privacy, criminal, moral, ethical, social and safety issues - there may be some interesting user experience implications that I can imagine would enhance a range of communication technologies, interfaces and devices.

Currently, most communication tools - IM, chat or VOIP application only offer basic functionality to communicate presence. For the user the entire range of expression is condensed to the stereotypical emoticon options. On the other hand, a tool that could accurately (within a yard stick or two) calculate you emotional state and project your mood in a dynamic, visually and engaging way to others, can communicate your presence in a more natural, emotionally rich way. Of course, I can also envisage the “annoyance factor” or the "TIVO intelligence" but imagine again the computer engaging with your accurate mood data, becoming emotion-aware and perhaps responding to your mood and in an attempt to appease you - entertain you directly from your media collection. If mood is hunger related it might even go further and order you a pizza with your favourite “crisis” toppings.

There are also some practical considerations for UX professions i.e. the potential to use such a tool to capture rich qualitative information from users. Designing experience is closely linked to understanding emotions of potential users and a tool like this may be able to shed some light on how users may feel. Remote behaviour analysis can be used to create personality profiles for predicting the targeted user’s state of mind; the data can be used to construct more enhanced personas of potential users; invariably enriching persona analysis methodologies. Of course i’m well aware of bio metric methods that use more precise technologies to do this, but these are often available only in state of the art lab facilities. The potential here is to yield very large and universal data sets that could allow us to understand more intimately peoples` relationship with media, technology and the products they use.

Would you be willing to give up some privacy for a little user experience?