happyneiness >> host: what is the role of technology in creating happiness? >> guest: well, i think the first thing is that technology is so much a part of our lives in one sense it has, to a certain extent, become us. outside of the idea of cyborg questions of could we have a make limb that is wi-fi enabled, which is possible, the logic is the smart phones are a huge part

of our lives and to ignore technology, i think for most of us, that is hard at a do. i read a study, i think was commissioned by the people at huffing post, that said of the woman surveyed in the study, 3,000 people, half of them said they would rather skip sex for a month than go without their smart phone. so my logic is let's acknowledge all of tools being used by advertise to track our life and make sure we are safe and recognize and study the patterns of well-being and mood and optimize or increase our hap happiness and not just our mood but our long-term wellbeing.

>> host: how tracked are we? >> guest: all of time. i think it is easier to assume there are very few times we are not tracked. most people said i read a lot of technology magazines like the garden -- the garden -- and they will say it doesn't effect me. but there are 45 million people on facebook who can be facially identified by tagging and they may not be on facebook. so to say my behavior isn't being tracked. it is best to acknowledge what is there. outside of mobile technology and our laptops and we are more used to the idea of cookie data as we

type on the website and we are aware that we leave a track of our digital activities through the cookies. a lot of people don't understand the concept of the internet of things or computing it censors around us that track our lives. one example is something like an easy pack pass. you drive from new jersey to new york and go 75 miles per hour and it gets deducted by the credit card. it has time stamp, location stamp and it is attached to my finances. that is one piece of my identity where i am being tracked knowingly and i have given permission for that but we are tracked all of the time. >> host: john in "hacking happiness - why your personal data counts and how

tracking it can change the world" i see data and technology when leveraged right as being instrumental toward insightful living. >> guest: i do and i talk about in the book if we want our lives to count we have to take account of our lives. the book was inspired by my dad who was a psychiatrist for years and i realized i wanted to continue his work. we sat 50 hours face to face to people and gave them the chance to take a measure of their lives. he gave them permission to reflect on their lives. in their case they were struggling with pretty serious stuff sometimes. but all of us in our lives, want to get permission for people to

realize when you track your life through something like a paper journal or through amazing tools or the new trend of quantified self, which you probably know about, the logic is you get to see all of the aspects of your life you may not have seen before and with data a lot of our life that has been invisible is visible. >> host: what do you mean by quantified self? >> guest: quantified self is a movement created by -- most people credit gary wolf -- and it has been around the world meet-ups where geeks like me come and talk about things they have been studying in their liblibe lives. they are data scientist or programmers. they track lives with giving it

a direction to track and having a bias why to track. most of us track our weight, myself included, and that is because you are upset over putting on too many pounds. so you are starting in a place of bias and assuming i have to lose wait or ex. science says i want to track other elements besides the weight loss. so a fit bit or jawbone and measure how their sleep affects their eating. they may realize if they go to sleep at 10:00 for two months without doing anything different they start to lose weight and they are doing that through data

and that logic means you can analyze your life and see where there are patterns. they are critical. and you have to give yourself 2-3 months depending on what you are studying but you can see insights and say if i change here, here and here i can optimize my well-being, health or mood. >> host: john havens, how many different entities or companies have information about us? >> guest: that is a great question. it is probably faster to list the companies that don't have information about us and that is either none, or i am being h hyper-bolic but in the states there is this industry of data brokers and many of them do great work that advertising agencies, marketers and we as

consumers rely on. information about a picture of our identity and when that data is made available to us i have no problem with data brokers but in the states it is a trillion dollar industry and the ftc has sanctions on ten of the broker companies and if i write to a company that has the data and asks for a full copy of what they collected about me they are not mandated to send that to me. it the same environment 20 years before with the credit card side of things. they didn't have to give us information about stuff we purchased. so when there is a sense of the data being collected about me, my kids, about you, about us

that we don't have access to by one particular part of the culture, i think that is a dangerous precedent and i am fighting people to understand this is your data and you should get to use it and i am not trying to dictate how they would use it but there is no standard policy about how the companies can or should collect it. >> host: how do the data brokers get their information? buy it from facebook oboe -- or google? >> guest: it varies. sometimes it is purchased from third parties or data taken from the source of say a browser, a web browser. and they have gotten good at taking the data and then putting

it into almost sound bytes so they can target with behavorial targeting. but if you see how they put us together into not a demographic like white, male, 45 lives near new york city. but listing a person who hasn't paid bills in the last six months or dead beat. there is this horrible icy sense of how they put our identity out in the world and they are broadcasting our identity the way they chose to. >> host: you wrote trust ranks high for the happiness of the economy. can we trust the data brokers? >> guest: i don't trust data brokers.

i don't like to demonize an industry. it is unfair to say they are evil but the words evil and trust are hard words because they are subjective. but i think transparency is key for me in the sense of when a data broker company won't give a person access to data about who they are, first of all, if they don't give any access i think first of all that means there is an industry ripe for disruption and it is trillion dollar industry. so that means that whole industry that is included and using the data about our lives there is an opportunity to sell the data directly to brands and it isn't a question of the transaction. it isn't i might get $10 a month from may data but it is more the

idea of the insight and where we are sharing the data, when, how it is it effecting our lives. we should get to own those insights. that is our identity and our data and how we uniquely live in the real and virtual world. >> host: happiness - why your personal data counts and how tracking it can change the world" you tell the story of federico zanure. who is that? >> guest: i believe he is an nyu student, or he was at the time i wrote the book. he did a fun thing and he put this own personal data on a kickic kickstarter account. he tracked his actions with a webcam pointed at himself and tracked his cookie data and he knew how to gather it and he had

a beautiful visualization about his life. and he said if everyone is tracking me and making money off my unique portrait and identity in the world digitally or in the real world when tracked by camera, he said i should be able to make money. that is my data. so it was an ex experiment in showing people what the data looked like. i paid $5 for two days of data. and he sent it to me and i don't know him and it isn't like i'm going to use him to target him but i almost bought it in the sense of a form of artwork because it was a portrait of his life for a few days. i like keeping the money from the people who are using the data where the sole purpose is without connect between me and a brand or individual there is no personal transaction when stuff

knows 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 well on kick starter. >> host: john havens, what did you learn about mr. zenure? >> guest: i learned he was smart, industerous 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 data, i didn't scrutinize it for too long. i saw he was a student and he was sitting around doing a lot of research like any 24-25 year old would do. but he is really an artist. when you have a data science who is parsing, analyzing, and examining data which is its own skill already but when you communicate with that data in

the form of pictures and visu visualization and let someone who doesn't understand the ones and zero of granular data he protrayed it as art. so >> host: john havens, how do you recommend people manage their own data? >> guest: there is a couple companies and precedents happening now that i would recommend people check out. there is a company called personal.com. i believe they are based in washington, d.c. and they a service fall fill-it. it is simple. the action of it, why i think they were so smart to introduce the idea of what is called a personal data vault or bank and what they did with the idea is you take the golden copy of your

data or pii like our social security number, name, address -- the preciousidate data that makes us see who you are. it is excruciating and of the 10-30 sites we visit today what we enter in a unique password on like 14 different sites. and if we asked the site to remember our cookie data it is still 14 different unique identify things all of the time. so phillip provides a service with the core data and that data is used anytime you sign-up anywhere. but the thing about personal.com and the idea of personal clouds that i talk a lot about in the book. this is something i encourage people to check out.

clouds or data banks, the logic is something new. a lot of people think it is theoreticle. i don't. i know it is a growing industry. what this means is most people right now are used to sharing their data like pictures and files in something like a drop box. if you haven't used drop box it is a cloud provider where instead of having it on a home drive you have it on cloud and you feel safer your files with with this provider. so that pii data, the idea theoretically is called the golden copy. the one first unique copy of that data you protect. and i said that one copy because most people think of data as

they go to a site and share something once. and the exchange of my data to use the service free for the next hour seems like a fair transaction. people don't realize that digital information can be copied a zillion times, sold and resold. a piece of your identity, whatever your action is and showing other activities you are doing at the same time. this logic, personal banks say no, you want to operate with me, let's talk and have a transaction one-on-one. now there is organizations like respect network and the non-profit fund and a global idea of trying to get the personal clouds to be something whereby 2015-2016 maybe a

million people will pay $25 us dollars a year to have the banks and they get to say who and when they want to share data with and for how long. the banks have this idea you can kill your data. if you see you shared your data with peter and you trust peter and that data gets to a third party provider, you may not know it was shared, i can get a ping, that is the mentality of these databases, that let's me know the data went somewhere that through the tiers of preference that is not how i want to data to be used. i have the power to go boom and watch it go away. personal.com is one of the many companies. reputation.com is doing great work and respect network and the work of dock surals who wrote

the "train manifesto" and a book called "the intention economy" and that talks about vendor relationship management where all of the third parties between an individual and a brand or individual and someone else they want to interact with digitally goes away. hopefully that is helpal -- helpful for what people can check out. >> host: but so much of the information is out there. why would we now put it in a lock box? >> guest: that is a great question. it is frustrating and there is this massive sense of we and this thought of if my data is out there why protect it. i spent money so why put it in a bank. and it is hard and reputation for instance their company does

more online reputation where you can see the website sharing data and try to have it removed. for me and my kids, i picture a time, to your question, why is it so precious? because your data is being shared. if we can stein and bring it in from this day forward how the data is shared we can try to manage it better. i am evangelistic that someone sharing your data without your permission is a human rights violation. and most people think i am extremist and like i went on a silly site and did a crossword puzzle. but i am like hold on, i will take ten different websites with cookie data and they know how many kids you have on his site,

they can identify your face using microsoft connect, there is technology that can read when your pupils dilate to correlate to information. by the time i give you five-ten ways parties gather data and pull it all together and then you start to see essentially our digital dopal gangers are being produced. it is easy to this technically. and we talk about privacy, which is important, but privacy has to do with preference a lot of times. 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

are 11 and 8, they can decide what they want to do. someone else might put pictures of their kids on facebook. that is a personal choice. but economically, my face when i was an actor, my face is how i made money. if i was in a commercial that ran for 13 weeks, if i knew someone in say california had seen that commercial and i had not gotten paid for the region where it was showing i would call the screen actors guild and say my face is being seen in a place i have not given permission and economically i have a right to do that and get paid money. i picture a day when my kids go to college and instead of a credit card company coming up to them asking them if they want data they will say if your data is protected we would like to

track you using google glass and these biometric censors and after a year we will pay you $10,000 because you are going to give us data about your life and we want to establish this solid relationship with you to know how you like our brand. that is another reason people should protect data because through the insight you can benefit versus unseen third parties. >> host: what are the policy implications? >> guest: there are a lot of implications. robert kennedy gave the speech in 1968 at the university of kansas that has been dubbed the "beyond gdp speech" beyond

gross domestic product. and he talked about why it was built and what it was made to measure. and he pointed out what you measure matters and what you measure is something you give value to. what you don't measure you devalue. not even nefariously. so he said what does it measure? economic increase when a relationship sinks or oil tanker sinks because cleaning up after it means people get more jobs. but of course the environment is ruined in the process. and he said what about the things that are not measured? like the quality of our education? the quality of art? he said they make all things worth living. so butan created something called gross national happiness and it is misnomer. a lot of people think it is this

rainbows and unicorn and let's measure happiness and mood. that is not it. it is this idea of happiness being intrinsic or utmonic happiness that has to do with long-term flurishing that has physical and mental metrics. gross national happiness and there is other ideas using similar measures to policy. it measures things like education, art, community and asks things, basically the idea of using quantified ameasureme t measurements. in the uk the prime minister has done a lot of details and put in an excel format. you can see at a community level how people are getting access to this. so the metrics are not saying the government is dictating what

brings them happiness from a mood standpoint. it is saying they are trying to have a wider lens as how we as citizens have more value and should provide a framework or setting where we can pursue happiness. it is the pursuit of happiness. not the guarantee of the mood base happiness. we should be allowed to have pursuit of happiness and well-being. they open up all lens and it isn't negative to the gdp it is saying fiscal, wealth and good are important but let's open up the lens and get a bigger picture how people want to live their lives. do we only value our lives based on the fiscal worth or is there a larger lens. >> host: john havens is the

founder of the happy thon project and he is the author of this new data counts and how tracking it can change the world". texas governor pick rery announced he is deploying as many as a thousand national guard troops to the border. perry is one of one of the most criticizing of the president and he said it is necessary to protect from crime and save taxpayers from the cost of the new arrives. that is from the hill. you can read more from thehill.com. >> this weekend on booktv afterwards. >> i thought it would be compelling to tell the story of a