What is Immersion? It reads your email account, sent and received (with your permission) and find details about you, your friends and your life. Here is from the article by Nidhi SubbaramanNBC News:
Immersion went live to the public on June 30, and has had more than 70,000 visitors so far, said Jagdish, who, along with fellow grad student Daniel Smilkov at Cesar Hidalgo’s Macro Connectionsgroup at the MIT Media Lab, built the analytical tool. Once you’ve securely entered your Gmail details and had a look at your contact map, Immersion gives you the option of deleting your information and logging out, or letting Immersion keep your compressed email metadata and user profile. That data is not shared outside the research group… metadata as “bits of information that you don’t pay attention to.” He believes Immersion can reveal aspects of your behavior and relationships that you may not have noticed before.
I ‘Immersed’ my gmail account and it dug through the past 4 years of my gmail. What I found out is I’m more boring than I originally thought. I didn’t need a special NSA-type software program to tell me that. I almost feel like I should apologize to the NSA for not being more exciting.
Brick ONeil 