The goal, the authors said, was to make machines that can “monitor social communication and provide real-time intervention.” To that end, twenty-two office employees were “instrumented” with the badge for one month in order to “automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system.” The research provided credible results, revealing patterns of communication and behavior that the authors concluded “would not be available without the use of a device such as the sociometric badge. Our results… argue strongly for the use of automatic sensing data collection tools to understand social systems.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1350