A few quick notes on how incentive systems can have odd second-order effects

I was talking with Wendy Mackay, at INRIA, yesterday, and we were talking about the Active Badges system from Xerox PARC and Euro PARC, now from about 15 years ago. Active Badges were a lot like any other corporate badge: they let you in and out the door. Unlike other corporate badges, though, they tracked your physical location. Active Badges resulted in studies of people moving through physical spaces, visualizations of who is in or out of the office, and social network analyses of who was near whom.

Wendy pointed out that the studies suffered from a tremendous amount of noise. People would would give each other their badges as they walked around, would leave their badges at their desks, would share badges to get through the doors. This wasn’t an anti-surveillance thing: it wasn’t at all clear that they were doing it more than they had before the study. It’s just that there was no reason not to, and it was often easier to reach over and grab someone else’s badge than it was to fish through your purse. Not long after we spoke, I saw one of her students return from a quick trip and pass the badge they were carrying back to the owner.

I was flabbergasted. At Microsoft, I’ve never heard of people doing that. I don’t think it’s that Microsofties are exceptionally compliant with the rules, nor do I think that employees are scared of punishment for misbehavior. And I’m pretty sure that we don’t think of ourselves as highly security conscious: all sorts of people wander the halls without badges. (Certainly, when I had a grad student office, we all shared keys.) But, on the other hand, a Microsoft badge is also a stored-value card with money on it. Swipe it at a starbucks or a lunch counter and you pull money off of it. It’s real money: it gets deducted from your paycheck, or replenished with cash.

I’m not claiming that this means I don’t trust my colleagues. I doubt any of them would go off and buy a cup of coffee with my card. But it probably does that we all think of them like money, rather than like (say) keys, and so we are generally careful of them.

I don’t know whether that was what was intentional on the part of corporate security: honestly, I suspect it was just a matter of convenience to unify the several badging systems. But the upshot is fascinating: if I am reading this right, putting money on cards teaches people to treat cards individually. And that, in turn, would make a system like Active Badges’ traces much more accurate.