Student name: Aston Lamport

Student ID: 221246829

SIT123: Data Capture Technologies

Lab Work Week 5.1: Ethical issues (30 marks)
In this task you will investigate ethical concerns in a given a case study.

Due Date Friday 5:00pm, 3rd September 2021

Pre-requisites: You must do the following before this task

1. Attend Class (Lecture) & Seminar

2. Completed previous Lab works
3. Read this sheet from top to bottom

Task Objective
Read the case studies given below and consider their ethical concerns.

Case study 1:
Consider your GPS data collected and mapped in Lab report 6. Now imagine your GPS traces
were collected for a period of 30 days, and shared publicly with your name without your
knowledge.

Case study 2:
Refer to the context of the data provided in Lab report 5. Here, data was collected from a motion
sensor installed in a user’s (John Doe) bathroom. John Doe is an elderly gentleman between 65-
75 years, and he lives by himself in his own home.
The data was part of John’s smart home system, which has motion sensors installed in every
room. All the sensor data being collected from John’s house, including his bathroom is uploaded
to a cloud server. The company who built the smart home system has access to John’s collected
sensor data in the cloud, and their artificial intelligent algorithms use the collected data to learn
about John’s behaviours and feed the learned patterns back to John’s smart home. John’s smart
home uses these learned patterns to make various decisions such as automating lights, heating
and if John is well (based on his activity). All of John’s data includes his name and address.

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 John himself does not have access to his data in the cloud.

Task Submission Details

There are 5 questions in this task. Answer all of them in this word document itself and submit to
unit site.

Q1: In case study 1, what should have been explained and obtained
prior to sharing your GPS traces publicly? Why?
(6 marks)
Prior to this the I should have given informed consent, making sure I knew what was being
tracked and the logistics of it as to not lead to any altercations that may have arisen for having
my location shared. I should have known where my information would have been shared and
who could have gained access to it.

Q2: What are some ethical concerns in case study 1?

(6 marks)
Some ethical considerations are for the safety of me, if people can see my every whereabouts
over a month they can easily figure out where I live, work and shop and what times I go to these
places so if they wanted to commit a robbery or cause bodily harm they can figure out the best
time and places from this information. This also breaches privacy as my location and behaviors
are shown and not being sure how the data will be used. There is also no anonymity as my
personal details are shared along with the data.

Q3: What are some ethical concerns in case study 2?

(6 marks)
Although the system is designed to help John there are various concerns such as the privacy of
his data. There are anonymity concerns with his name and address being attached to
information that learns his movement patterns and this could be dangerous if it got leaked or if
the database got broken into which is a security concern. John also has a right out of respect to
be able to view his own data which he currently doesn’t, he should also know who else has
access to his data, if its everyone who works for the company or just a couple individuals that
manage the database and machine learning.

Q4: What adverse effects may arise as a result of the aforementioned

ethical concern/s? Explain using examples.
(6 marks)
Anonymity concerns where ones address and name are accessible such in the case with John.
Combining this also with security concerns if the someone would be able to target him directly,
access and use the data to know when he normally left the house on a daily basis and rob him.

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There is a lack of trust and privacy concerns with data tracking, not being sure who gets
accessed to that data, what it will really be used for and who will see it. Many company’s may
sell your location data to advertising platforms to then advertise to you the cafe you walk past
everyday or something else.

Q5: Explain how one of the ethical concerns you mentioned can be
addressed.
(6 marks)
Security concerns are probably one of the easier ethical concerns to address. An immediate
way to improve this is to make sure the number of authorized personnel with access to the data
is limited to only what is needed and therefore trust in everyone to not leak data is lessened.
Next would be to improve the security on the system, making sure data is protected behind high
level passwords and tokens in a network with high security that is difficult to be hacked. Taking
as little data as possible also lowers safety concerns as the less data that can be used to
identify and attack the individual the better.

SIT123: Data Capture Technologies

Lab Work Week 5.2: Data Capture Scenarios (30
marks)
In this task you will investigate two scenarios that involve capturing data and making inferences
based in the data.
You can use similar ideas for your project.

Due Date Friday 5:00pm, 3rd September 2021

Pre-requisites: You must do the following before this task

1. Attend Class (Lecture) & Seminar

2. Read this sheet from top to bottom

Task Objective
Read the project ideas given below and consider their requirements

Scenario 1:

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John has two plants on the balcony of his house. These plants require constant attention and
caring. He has to water them when they require and make sure the soil moisture is kept at
optimum levels. Otherwise the plants will not be in good shape and may not survive. John has
become very busy these days and with his age it is hard for him to keep record and remember
when to water the plants. He is looking for a smart solution to notify him when the plants need to
be watered. Such a solution needs to provide a notification using an LED light connected to the
pot to indicate when the soil moisture is below and over a certain limit. In addition, John also
wants to find out if both plants require the same amount of water, or if he should be watering them
different levels.
Note: Assume that both plants are planted in identical pots, using identical potting mix.

Scenario 2:
Jane, Megan and Kim are university students who enjoy cycling. Since they live in different
suburbs, they usually cycle on their own, and not together. They think that it will be interesting to
compare where they’ve been cycling. They want to see if they can find out some common areas
and times to cycle together, based on things like distance, elevation, day of the week and times
of the day.

Task Submission Details

There are 8 questions in this task. Answer all of them in this word document itself and submit to
unit site.

Q1: Propose a solution to the problem given in Scenario 1, using the

Sense-Think-Act paradigm. Give an overview of your proposed
solution, and outline its Sense-Think-Act requirements.
• (5 marks)
The soil moisture would sense the level of moisture in the soil. The soil level would be collected
in a spreadsheet to possibly learn the frequency when the plant needs watering. In the thinking
section the moisture level is checked against the parameter given for the lower and upper level
of moisture that is recommended and when it goes outside of the level it acts on the LED to turn
on, if above it turns on green and below the level it turns on red, when in range the LED is off.
Each plant would have their own sensor and LED and the collected data would be stored in a way
that identifies each plant individually, extrapolation can then be done after enough data is
collected to identify intervals between the light being turned on from the off state to see if it is a
consistent pattern.

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Q2: Propose a solution to the problem given in Scenario 2, using the
Sense-Think-Act paradigm. Give an overview of your proposed
solution, and outline its Sense-Think-Act requirements.
(5 marks)
Sensing would be down through a location tracker collects their elevation, GPS and the date and
time which the data is collected at. The thinking would be the collecting of the data and comparing
it against the other students data and the act would be to notify the users if there is overlap
between location cycled and when they cycled through the area which they would have crossed
paths. They could then change the time they road that day as to overlap paths at the same time
as one of the other students and take the same path for as long as it overlapped.

Q3: What kinds of hardware do you think can be used to solve the
problem in scenario 1?
(3 marks)
As listed the hardware needed would be a soil moisture and LED as well as an Arduino to process
the data.

Q4: What kinds of hardware do you think can be used to solve the
problem in scenario 2?
(3 marks)
A phone with a GPS tracking software installed would be the only hardware needed to track all
the data they needed.

Q5: Think of a data collection approach to be used in Scenario 1.

a) What things can result in ‘dirty data’ in this case?
When the plant is watered, and the sensor comes in contact with the water the moisture
level will spike very high even though the soil may not be very saturated.

b) What can you do to clean the data?

Values that are null or above a certain parameter (too high of a value) can be
ignored/deleted from the system.
(4 marks)

Q6: Think of a data collection approach to be used in Scenario 2.

a) What things can result in ‘dirty data’ in this case?
Dirty data might result from the GPS signal be picking the wrong location or a null value
such as when going through a tunnel with poor reception.

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 b) What can you do to clean the data?
To clean the data any null values would be deleted and you could have a parameter that
sees if you go off the road to delete it or if the speed to get between the 2 points over the
timespan the location was wrong is above a certain plausible speed to delete that data.
(4 marks)

Q7: Propose some ways to extend your proposed solution for scenario
1.
(3 marks)
To improve upon this and make it even easier for John you would be able to automate the
watering with a pump connected through the system, whenever the moisture level dropped
too low the pump would turn on. So, John would only have to fill up the water supply less
frequently than he would have to water each plant and the plants would get optimal watering
if John didn’t realise the plants LED was on.

Q8: Propose some ways to extend your proposed solution for scenario
2.
(3 marks)

They could set a radius for which their paths overlap, not just when they ride on the same section
of road, in which to notify the students of the overlap. Such as setting a 2KM radius so if anyone’s
path is within a 2km radius they could both ride slightly out of their normal path next time to meet
with each other. There might also be a live update so if any point during your ride you are close
to someone you get notified and not just after your ride when your data has been processed.