Processing Data collected by apps like myGate: An Extrapolative Probe
Team Panda (Avani Sharma, Ketaki Paranjape, MOHIT MOHAN)
After understanding how a gated community has become such an important aspect of the suburbs regions of various developing cities of India and around the world, we figured out that Security is an aspect that plays a major role in the selection of these gated communities.
According to a survey, the search for the correct gated community which provides the maximum and most advanced form of security has topped the list in the hunt of basic needs of living for a human.
Security Concerns at Gated Communities
Applications like myGate, Apna Complex, ApartmentADDA, CommonFloor, etc have tried their best to provide security and address various security concerns at various levels.
Identifying the various stakeholders involved in the apartment based communities, we tried to map the areas where security would play a major role. Be it lack of awareness amongst the residents and gatekeepers regarding the rules and regulations or their careless attitude towards their safety or the unavailability of certain amenities, security is always questioned at these levels.
Scenario before migrating to these platforms
Security is not a new concept. Even though we’ve come a long way from the ancient techniques employed by our ancestors, security has remained a major concern.
Watchtowers, Big walls, Big gates, Moats, early warnings were some of the ancient means to keep home and hearth safe from harm.
Advancement in security got a boom when the first CTV system was invented in 1942 during World War Two. Since then, engineers, scientists, designers have been inventing various creative and technically advanced forms of securing homes and apartments. The concept is not just confined to independent homes but has also extended to big bungalows, housing apartments, gated communities.
Looking at not just physical aspect of security, we also tried to understand the non-tangible form of security — the privacy of data that we users, knowingly or unknowingly provide to these applications.
Started off by looking into the Security Concerns of a Gated Community, we ended up realizing that, the data that flows through the various hierarchical levels of the platforms (which claims to be Future of Security Systems at a gated community) needs a closer look and has potential to form a bigger Service Platform.
Insights from Study
From the various articles and case studies that we analysed, we figured out that there are various grounds on which myGate claims to have secured our data and that the data will not be used for any other purpose.
The database of these applications consists of various instances which stand independent of each other (one instance refers to the data collected of a single community). But since all the information ultimately moves to a centralized database, it becomes potentially hack-able and more risky.
Interest and Research Area
Our Research area focus on analysis of the huge amount of data that these gated community platforms collect. What will happen when they start to re-categorize the data and extrapolate it to provide benefits in the form of service platform to its users, is an area we would look into.
What if, apps like myGate, Apna Complex, etc. use the data that they have collected, find patterns in it and start Offering Services?
To achieve this, we would start by:
- Describing what exact data these platforms collect
- Creating dummy data under the broad categories
- Re-categorizing the data to see what patterns could be formed through it
- Finding implications from it
The patterns could be like how many people visit a particular flat, at what time or during which days of the week is the crowd maximum, etc. Then extending these patterns to visualize and represent scenarios graphically what services could be provided by the platforms.
