>> legislation designed to protects reproductive right. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> host: john havens, what do you mean by hacking happiness with app in brent -- brent

cease? >> guest: ing well, thanks for asking. by the word hacking, i mean a playful rethinking of a subject as compare today a nefarious computer hacker, and that has to do with the book that i wrote. the logic is we can rethink happiness so it's not just about mood, and we can also measure happiness by using emerging technology, and that's also where the app in paren the cease comes into play. how you can be accountable, how you can be a provider and how you can be proactive. so it has to do with a subject matter i cover in the book. >> host: what's the role of technology in creating happiness? >> guest: well, i think it's, the first thing is that technology is so much a part of our lives now in one sense, it has to a certain extent become us. outside the idea of sort of cyborg questions, we have a fake limb that's wi-fi enabled which is pretty possible, the

logic is that our iphones and smartphones are such a huge part of our lives, to ignore technology or say i'm just going to ignore it, i think for most of us in this day and age is pretty hard to do. i recently read a study that said of the women surveyed in this sur say -- there were about 3,000 people -- almost half of them, 48%, said they would rather skip sex for a month than go without their smartphone. so my logic in the book is let's acknowledge all the wonderful tools that are being used largely right now by advertisers and marketers to track our lives, to headache sure that our data -- make sure that our data is safe, but use the sensors and the other aspects of these phones so we can actually recognize and study the patterns of our well being, our mood and actually optimize or increase our happiness. and, again, not just our mood, but our intrinsic, long-term welling being. >> host: how tracked are we?

>> guest: we are tracked -- [laughter] ubiquitously, intimately and all the time. like, i think it's easier just to assume there are very few times that we're not tracked. by that, most people will say to me a lot of times, you know, i read a lot for technology magazines like marble and the guardian -- mashable and the guardian, and they'll say, well, it doesn't t affect me because i'm not on facebook. look, first of all, the number's something like 45 million people whose photos are on facebook and who can be facially identified through tagging, and they may not even be on facebook. so to say like my activity and my behavior that i know about means that i'm not being tracked is, in general, factually just untrue. so it's best to sort of acknowledge what's there. secondly, outside of things like mobile technology and our laptops which we're most more used to this idea of cookie data

as we type in our computer and go to a web site, we're aware that we leave a track of our digital activity through these cookies. a lot of people don't understand the concept of the internet of things or what's also known as you ubiquitous computing. and what that means is sensors in the world around us or things like surveillance cameras as well that track our lives. one example that people are pretty familiar with is something like an ez-pat. you drive from -- i live in jersey, so you drive from jersey to new york, go 70 miles an hour and get automatically deducted from your credit card, and that's an hfid -- are fid -- rfid technology. that's just one little piece of my identity when i'm being tracked. now, again, knowingly, and ostensibly i've given permission for that. but we are tracked all the time. >> host: john havens, you write

in your new book: i see day and technology when leveraged via informed choice as being instrumental toward insightful living. >> guest: i do, and thanks for the quote. i talk in the book about if we want our lives to count, then we have to take account of our lives. and the book was really inspired by the loss of my dad. and my dad was a psychiatrist for over 40 years, and what i realized in dealing with my grief be over his loss is that i really wanted to continue his work. what he did is he sat in front of people, next to people, and we tracked it once. i think it was 50,000 hours that he sat face to face. and what he did is he gave people the chance to take a measure of their lives. he gave them permission to reflect on their lives. now, in their case, you know, they were struggling sometimes with some pretty serious stuff. but all of us in our lives, i want to get per higgs in one

sense -- permission in one sense for people to realize that when you track your life through something like a paper journal or certainly through these amazing tools or the new trend of quantified self, the logic is you get to see all the aspects of your life you may not have seen before. and with data, a lot of our lives that's been invisible becomes visible, and we can use it for ourselves. >> host: what do you mean by quantified self? >> guest: sure. so quantified self is a movement that was created, most people credit gary wolfe from "wired" magazine. and be by movement, i mean it's actually been around the world now globally, all these meet-up groups where geeks like me come to meet-ups and talk about things they've been studying in their lives. and a lot of times these are data scientist thes or programmers and -- scientists or programmers, and i have great admiration for the skill a lot of data scientists have which is the ability to track your life

with some type of general hypothesis. but the hypothesis is more to give it direction versus already having a bias for why to track. so i'll give you a for instance. most of us, you know, track our weight, you know, myself included. you track your weight because you're upset, you know? oh, i put on too many pounds over the holidays or something. so you're already starting in one sense from place of bias, and you're assuming that i have to lose weight or x. a good data scientist, what they tend to do is they take a step back and say, well, i want to optimize my health, and i will be healthier, yes, if i lose this weight, but i also want to do behavior where i can track other elements besides just this weight with loss. so, for instance, they may get a fitbit or a jawbone and measure how their sleep affects their eating. so instead of just getting on the scale or going to the gym, they may realize if they go to sleep every night at 10:00 for two months, they start to lose

weight. and they're doing that through data. and that logic means you can start to analyze your life, see where there's patterns. the patterns are critical. and you have to give yourself two or three months depending on what you're studying. but you can start to see these insights and say, well, if i change these different things here, here and here, i can optimize my well being, my health or even my mood. >> host: john havens, how many different entities or companies have information about us? >> guest: well, peter, it's a great question. it's, again, it's easier to say in terms of companies that have information about us, it's probably faster to list the companies that don't have information about us. and, first of all be, that's either none or, you know, i'm being a little bit hyperboll bic, but it depends on which company we're talking about, sort of what vertical n. the states especially there's this whole industry of data brokers, and day -- data brokers, many of

them doing great work that we as consumers rely on. you know, information about sort of an aggregate picture of our identity. and when that data is made available to us, i have no problem with data brokers. but in the states ahone, it's about a trillion dollar annual industry, and right now as of today -- unless i've missed something in the past couple weeks -- the ftc has sanctioned about ten of these largest data brokers ors and these industries right now today, if i write to, say, an axiom or a different company that that has this datad ask them for a full copy of what they've collected about me, they are not mandated to send that to me. it's the same type of environment that we were in back about 20 years ago before i forget the name of the act, but with the credit card side of things, credit card companies didn't have to give us information about what we've purchased. even if we pay them. so when there's an acolluded

sense of all of this data that's being collected about he, about you, about us that we don't have access to about one particular part of the culture, i think it's a very dangerous precedent, and it's something i'm really fighting to have people understand. this is your data. you should get to manage it and use it so, again, i'm not trying to dictate how people would use it, but right now there's no common standards or policies even about how any of those companies can or should collect right now. >> host: john havens, these ten or so data brokers that you speak of, how do they get their information? do they buy it from a facebook, from a google? >> guest: it varies, and different data brokers, you know, i can speak in general terms how they get it. sometimes they'll purchase it from third parties, a lot of times they might have cookies, you know, data this' taken -- that's taken originally from a source, say a browser, a web browser, and they've just gotten really good at aggregating all

that day and putting it into almost sound bites for companies so they can then more effectively, if that's the right word to choose, more specifically target with behavioral targeting. but if you see sometimes kind of the inner workings of how these data brokers put us together in terms of not a demographic like me, white male, 45 who lives near new york city, but listing a person like hasn't paid their bills in the past six months or deadbeat, there's this real, horrible, very icky sense of how these data brokers parcel our identities out to the world. and, again, they're broadcasting our identities in the ways that they choose to do to the companies they sell to. >> host: you write that trust ranks high in importance for the happiness economy. can we trust these data brokers? >> guest: i don't trust data brokers. and, again, it's -- i don't like to unilaterally demonize an

industry, because that's not fair, and and also it's uninformed to just say they're evil, you know? and the word "evil" and the word "trust," they're both tough words because they're so subjective fending on the angle you're taking. but i i will say i think transparency is key for me in the sense of when a company, a day broker company won't give a person access to data about who they are. first of all, if they don't give any access, then i think, first of all, there's an industry that's ripe for disruption. and again, it's about a trillion dollar annual industry. actually according to "the new york times" in 2013, i think it's $1.1 billion in revenue they made. so that means that whole industry that are using the data about our lives, there's this opportunity potentially for us to sell our data directly to brands. and, again, it's not just a question of the transaction. it's not, oh, i might get $10 a month for my data, although

there's a lot of great companies doing that type of work. but it's more this idea of the insight, as i mentioned. where are we sharing that data? when? how is it affecting our lives? we should get to have those insights. it's how we uniquely live in the real and virtual world. >> host: in your book "hacking happiness: why your personal data counts and how tracking it can change the world," you tell the story of finishing -- federico. who is that? >> guest: i wish i had met him. i believe he's an nyu student, or at least he was at the time i wrote the book. he did a really fun thing which is he put his own personal data up on a kickstarter account. what that means is i think it was for a month, maybe longer, he tracked his action. he had a web cam pointed at himself. he tracked all his cookie data,

and he had beautiful visualizations about his life. and the point he was making is, look, if everyone else is going to track me anyway and make money off of my actions -- again, my unique portrait and identity in the world, digitally or even in, quote, the real world when we get tracked by cameras and rfid tags and all that -- he said i should be able to make money, that's my data. so it was, in one sense, almost an experiment. but these beautiful visualizations, graphs and pie charts. i forget what it was, i paid $5, i think, for two days of data. and he sent it to me. i don't know him, it's not like i'm going to use it to target him, but i almost bought it in the sense of it was a form of artwork to me because it was a portrait of his life for those few days. and, again, i like keeping that money from people who are going to use his data or our data where the soul practice is without any direct connection between me and a brandt or between me and -- and a brand or

between me and another individual. there's no personal transaction when stuff goes to a third party data broker, and i think he did a wonderful job of portraying how our data is ours, and i think he did pretty well on kickstarter. >> host: so, john havens, what did you learn about him? >> guest: i learned he was smart and industrious, and in terms of selling his data, i learned he got my money. i was happy to pay him $5 and get what he sent me. and in terms of the specific granularity of his data, i didn't, you know, scrutinize it for too long. i saw he's a student, so he was sitting around for a month doing a lot of research for, you know, i think a 24, 25-year-old would do. i thought it was interesting. but especially, again, he's really an artist. you know, when you have someone who cannot only be a data scientist and parse and examine and analyze day which is its own skill already, but when you can

communicate what that data is in the form of pictures or visualizations and let someone like me or most people who don't really understand the 1s and 0s or sort of granular-level day, he portrayed these things, essentially, as art. so i got a sense of his life for a few days in the form of artwork. >> host: john havens, how do you recommend people manage their own day? >> guest: so in terms of managing your own data, there's a couple of companies and a couple of precedents that are happening right now which i would highly recommend people check out. first of all, there's a company called personal.com, i believe they're based in d.c., and they have a service right now that they fall fill it. and it's pretty simple. the action of it, why i think they were so smart to introduce the idea of what's called the personal data vault or personal bank which i'll explain more in a second, what they did is you take what's called the golden copy of your data or what is

called pii datas personally-identifiable information, this is the stuff like your social security number, your name, your address, the most precious aspects of your identity that makes it the easiest to see who you are in any environment. see meaning digital or in the real world. so fill it, right now today it's excruciating, it's 2014, and i'm sure you like this. of the 10, 20, 30 sites we'll visit today, you and i both, ether, we'll enter in a unique password on, like, 14 different sites. and even if they remember, we've asked the site to remember our cookie data, the point is it's still 14 different, unique identifiers all the time. anyway, so the service that fill it provides is you have of that core data of yours, and then you, i think you press a button, and that data is used anytime you sign up anywhere. but the thing about personal.com and this idea of what are called personal clouds that i talk a hot about in the book, this is

something i strongly encourage people to check out. clouds or databanks, the logic is something new. a lot of people think it's just theoretical. i don't want. i think now -- or i know from my research of people i've talked to, it's a growing industry. what this means is most people right now are used to sharing their data like their pictures or their files in something like a dropbox. and if you haven't used dropbox, it's a cloud provider where instead of having your files stored on a home hard drive, it goes up to a cloud which means there's servers somewhere else and you feel safer, maybe with amazon, for instance, that your files are with this provider. so a personal cloud or a personal vault or databank, that pii data, the i'd theoretically but also with how it actually functions, is that precious data -- and, again, it's called the golden copy. the one first, unique copy of that data you protect. and why i say that one copy is

most people think of their data as they go to a site, and they share something once. they sign a terms and conditions agreement, and they're like, cool, i'll sign this one, and the exchange of my data to use this service free for the next hour, that seems like a fair transaction. people don't realize that, of course, your digital information can be copied a zillion times, literally hundreds of thousands of times, sold and resold and resold. and, again, that's a piece of your identity time stamped, whatever your action was, easily aggregate bl to show our activities you're doing at the same time. this logic, personal banks, this is hine. you want to operate with me? let's talk. let's have a transaction one-on-one. so now there's also organizations like respect network and the nonprofit that i founded called the happithon project, and respect network. globally, he's trying to get this idea of these clouds to be something whereby 2015, 2016

maybe even a million people will pay $25 a year to have these databanks and to protect and be able to manage their own data so they get to say when and with who they want to share day with and also for how long. a lot of these day banks what's fascinating is this idea you can kill your data. if you see you shared your data with someone, i'm going to share my data with peter because i trust peter, and through no fault of your own, that gets to a third party provider, i can get sort of a ping -- that's the mentality of these databanks -- i get a ping that lets me know that this data has gone somewhere. i know that's not how i want my data to be used. i then have the power to go -- and watch it go be away. so, again, to review, personal.com is one of the many companies, reputation.com is doing great work in this space. i advise people and respect network, also the work of a guy

named doc serles who wrote the clue train manifesto and "the intention economy." it's a must-read in terms of what he calls vendor relationship management, vrm, where all the other sort of interlopers or third parties between an individual and, say, brand or an individual and someone else they want to interact with digitally goes away. so, hopefully, that's helpful in terms of people, you know, what they can check out. >> host: but, john havens, so much of our information is already out there. why would we now put it in a lockbox, in a sense? >> guest: it's a great question, you know? the it's frustrating, and i think right now there's this massive sense of irritation, well, if all my data's out there, why protect it? i think the equivalent is sort of asking, you know, i've spent money before, why would i now put money in bank? and i'm not trying to be funny or mitigate your question. it's hard. you know, reputation, for

instance, their company does more of the online reputation stuff where you can potentially see the web site's sharing data that you don't want to share and try to have it removed. that sort of thing. but certainly for me and my kids, i picture a time, for instance, to your question, why is it so precious? because our day is exponentially being shared, you know? if we can stymy it a bit and, again, bring it in, then from this day toward how our data is shared we can at least try to manage it better. and for me, i'm advantage listic about the -- evangelistic that somebody sharing your data without your permission is a human rights violation. most people think i'm extremist because they're like, what do you mean, human rights violation? i got a coupon, went op a silly site and did some kind of cross word puzzle. this isn't snowden selling secrets to the nsa. but i'm like, hold on, i'm going to take ten different examples of cookie data, they know how

many kids you have, they can identify your face through facial recognition technology and eye tracking using something like microsoft connect and read when your pupils die late to correlate to some kind of emotion. by the time i give you five, let alone ten different ways commercial parties can gather our data through the press of a puton or algorithm pull that all together and you start to see our digital doppelgangers are being produced in the digital world. i'm not being extremist at all. it's very simple to do this stuff technically, and i always am mystified when people say, well, why wouldn't you want to control this data? i'll give you an example, there's an economic aspect to this. a lot of times we just talk about privacy. privacy's a very important thing, but i remind people that privacy a lot of times has to do with preference. i mean, for instance, i don't take pictures of my kids and put them on facebook because i don't want them to be tagged and facially tracked.

when they get old enough, they're 11 and 8, they can decide what they want to do. someone else may put pictures of their kids on facebook, a personal choice for you and your family. however, what i say economically is -- and i used to be an actor -- my face when i was an actor in the screen actor's guild, my face was how i made money. if i was in a commercial in the new england area that ran for 13 weeks, if i knew that someone in, say, california had seen that commercial and i hadn't gotten paid for the region where it was showing, i would call the screen actor toes guild and say, hey, my face being seen someplace i haven't been given permission. and economically, i had a right to do that and could be paid money. similarly, i picture the day when my kids go to college and instead of a credit card company coming up to them saying, hey, do you want a $10,000 line of credit adding to their enormous college debt, they're actually going to say, look, if your

data's protected in a way you feel comfortable and safe, we'd like to track you for the next year using google glass and these types of biometric sensors. tell all your trends and family that you're doing it and get permission and waivers from them. but after a year we're going to pay you $10,000 because you're going to give us such granular data, and more importantly, we want to establish this solid relationship with you to know how you genuinely like our brand. that's another reason is people should protect their data is because through the insights of that data, you get to benefit from it versus unseen third parties. >> host: john havens, what are the policy implications along with privacy? >> guest: there's a lot of policy implications into what i call the happiness economy, and first, you know, got to give credit where it's due. robert kennedy gave the speech in 1968 at the university of kansas that's been dubbed the beyond gdp speech, beyond gross

domestic product. and what he talked about in that speech was why the gdp came into being and what it was built to measure. and he pointed out something that most people don't think about, i certainly didn't until about two years ago, i'm not an economy. what you measure hearts, and what you measure is something you give value to. what you don't measure you devalue. not even necessarily nefariously. so he says what does the gdp measure? it measurings things like -- it measures things like economic decrease, when an oil tanker sinks. why? because cleaning up after it, there's more people get jobs but, of course, the environment gets roomed in the process. what about things that aren't measured? the quality of art. he said, in short, all the things that make life worth living. so buton created something around 19, i think, 72 called gross national happiness.

and it's kind of a misnomer. a lot of people think it's sort of this, you know, rainbows and unicorns, let's measure happiness in mood. it's not this at all. it's, again, this idea of happiness being intrinsic or what positive psychologists call unimonic happiness which has physical as well as mental and emotional characteristics and metrics. so gross national happiness, there's a lot of other metrics around the world using similar ideas to measure things with regards to policy. it measures things like education, art, community and asks things, basically, the idea is using quantified and call tautive metrics and measurements, like in the u.k. prime minister cameron has done a lot of this work and put the data online in excel sheet format. very transparent, it's great. you can start to see at a neighborhood level, how are people having access to all of these things?

so gross national happiness and happiness metrics are not saying the government is dictating what will bring them happiness from a hood standpoint, it's saying they're trying to have a wider lens of how we as citizens have value. and, again, it should make them more transparent to provide a framework or a setting where we can pursue happiness much like the founders talked about in the declaration of independence. it's the pursuit of happiness. it's not a guarantee. we should be allowed to have the pursuit of happiness and well being, and they open up the lens -- by the way, complimentary to the gdp. it's just saying, okay, fiscal wealth and goods, that's important. but let's open up the lens and get a bigger picture of how people want to live their lives. do we only value our lives based on our worth, meaning our fiscal worth? is or is there a larger lens beyond wealth if more our worth, and that's what these metrics are doing really well. >> host: john havens is a

contributing writer for mashable, the guardian, and he is the author of this new book, "hacking happiness: why your personal data counts and how tracking it can change the world." >> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> today politico looks at the political climate heading into fall's midterm elections and the potential implications for 2016's presidential election. political consul taxes, pollsters and operates will take part of the discussion. you can see it live beginning at noon eastern here on c-span2. >> we are tracked ubiquitously, intimately and all