Lumosity: a warning to users
av Sigve Indregard
Beklager til mine norske lesere for at dette er på engelsk.
Lumosity is one of those services you sign up for and enjoy for a while. It measures and supposedly trains your cognitive skills. It combines this with your demographic data to enable comparison with other, similar users. Now, this isn’t very important data, and this service could be one of those things where you choose to give up some of your privacy in return for a service.
But I’ve always been puzzled by sites that deny users the option to delete their data. In Norway, where I live, this is clearly illegal by our own law of privacy. Data related to people should not be kept in registers for any longer than they are needed, and people have the right to know what data are registered on them. I found an e-mail address in Lumosity’s Terms of Service, and requested the deletion of my user profile. This is the answer I got:
Your information and data are private, according to the terms of sign up. If you wish to stop receiving emails, please use the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the original email you received, as I cannot administer list changes. Thanks!
Best,
Aimee
A bit puzzled, I replied:
I’m not sure what to make of your response. I would like you to delete my user account. Can you please do that? Whether my data is “private” or not is more of a semantic question, given the terms of service.
And today, I got the reply:
I’m sorry, but it’s not possible for us to completely purge your information from our system. Your information is secure as our terms and conditions state, but if you are worried about your information being “out there,” I would recommend logging into your account at lumosity.com/login, then going to “My Account” in the top right corner. From there, you can change the information associated with your profile.
This got me nervous. Why would anyone construct a website where the staff can’t purge user accounts? After all, the signup terms state that user accounts can be deleted if they are impersonators or minors. Clearly, Lumos Labs were lying to me.
This is a problem if the privacy policy or terms of service of the company opens up for leaks of my personal data. I decided to read Lumosity’s Privacy policy, and I was dismayed to find this there:
We may enhance or merge personal information with your other information and with data from third parties in order to better market and provide our products and services.
In order to better market their products and services? That includes many activities, and they are not required to inform be beforehand. And furthermore:
We employ other companies and people to perform tasks on our behalf and need to share your information with them to provide products or services to you. […] Unless we tell you differently, these agents do not have any right to use Personal Information we share with them beyond what is necessary to assist us.
Which basically translates to: We share all the data we want with whoever we want as long as it helps us. For instance, it clearly “assists” Lumosity to share the data on my skills to a paying recruitment agency or university.
We also disclose Personal Information when required to do so by law, or in response to a subpoena, court order, or other legal mechanism, or when we believe, in our sole discretion, that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of the Company, third parties or the public at large.
Again the “good part” is in the first part of the sentence, and the bad part in the end. They share data if they believe it is “reasonably necessary” to anyone (the company, third parties or the public at large? That is everyone).
We reserve the right to sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of our assets, including information provided by you, in connection with a merger, reorganization or sale of some or all of our assets or in the event of bankruptcy. In any such event, personally identifiable and other information may be one of the assets transferred. We will post notice before personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
Again, this looks reasonable at first. But when you combine this with their non-deletion-policy, it’s not. They can choose to sell the information about me, if they only notice me beforehand. But I have no way to get out of this, even if they notice me. When the information is sold, the new privacy policy will enter into effect, and that can effectively make my personal information freely available to anyone. This means Lumosity, if they go bankrupt, will make data on my whereabouts and cognitive skills available to anyone interested.
Do also note that Lumosity has a “friends” feature, which is obviously a lot more sensitive than the data on your cognitive skills. I strongly recommend against using this.
As I said earlier, I could agree to take the risk if this was a free service, much like I can agree to watch advertisements in Google. But Lumosity costs $ 80 per year, which is a lot for access to some flash games. I don’t think Lumosity has evil intents, but I am not going to pay for it as long as their privacy policy is this weak. I recommend that you do not either.
And by the way: The so-called scientific base of Lumosity is bogus. One white paper explains how they test for “better working memory” on a group of people with an average age of 54. They ran pre– and post-tests using a web application — one of their games. In between these tests, some participants used Lumosity’s games every day, while a control group didn’t. Unsurprisingly, the control group performed worse than the trained group — but the control group did also improve significantly. The reason, obviously, is that both groups got better at using the tool. The difference between the groups is that the trained group got to play every day for five weeks (an average of 30 times before the post-test), while the control group got to play once before the examination.
I can use myself as an example. When I used the games for the first time, I received much worse scores than the second time. Only at the fifth or sixth day, perhaps game number 15 or 16, did my scores level out. The implication of this is that scoring well on Lumosity’s games is a skill separate from my cognitive abilities. Either that, or my problem solving skills went from the lowest tenth of the population to the top ten in one week. While I’m sure the “scientific” pre– and post-tests were longer than my first playing of the games, the effect of five weeks of technical training in similar games would be far larger than the real effect on their cognitive skills.
The results of their games can’t — and shouldn’t — be interpreted as real estimates of “memory”, “attention”, “processing speed” or any other faculty of the brain. It should be interpreted as “skill in Lumosity’s games”, much like IQ tests measure how well you perform on IQ tests, and little else. The validity of their measure is quite simply too low, and in particular the validity of changes over time in these games will be even lower. Furthermore, the effect of reading a book or going for a stroll might very well be stronger than the effect of playing a computer game.
I am not saying Lumosity’s games do any harm. The games are fun to play and perhaps they improve the brain. The problem is that they might very well not improve the brain. The so-called science of Lumos Labs does not prove what they claim to be proving. It is not science.
Disclaimer: I am not a neuroscientist. But I do know statistics.
Lumosity’s self-promotion. Note how the control group, who supposedly received no training, mysteriously had an effect.
Nøt du denne? Da vil du kanskje like:
Hei,
I agree with your blog. It is too bad Norway does not rule the world. Things would be perfect.
Their games do not train the core brain functionality and the brain plasticity, but rather superficial functions such as memory, math skills and so on. All of these can be practiced (to the level of having an exceptional result) by almost anyone, no matter the IQ. A real brain training should dig deeper in the qualitative brain abilities instead of the quantitative. Lumosity’s way of training won’t make anyone smarter. That’s why I quit 5min after I signed up. Blah, I’m sick of such frauds. I wanted to delete my account too, but since there is no such an option at least let’s make sure more people know about this fraud.
I think ur concerns are a bit overblown. Who really cares about your game performance data? Some data should be kept confinential b/c in the wrong hands it can cause serious damage — however, it’s a bit of a stretch to call Lumosity’s data as such. Plus the platform gives you a way to remain anonymous — why don’t u use that, instead of complaining about a low-Low-LOW-LEVEL threat. If you want to help the world, I think u need to find another area to blog about — there are plenty.
I don’t believe there’s any real risk, so I would agree that this does not enter into any program of “saving the world”. I find it, however, troubling to submit information on my mental skills to an organization that lies to me. But as I said, not much risk.
The second part is the worst: their pseudo-science is aimed at bamboozling people into paying for services (that is: mindless flash games) they otherwise would not pay for. I believe consumer “journalism” (or blogism) has its place in such circumstances.
I’ve done the 5 day trial, thinking of extending to one month subscription.
I’m going to simply ignore half your article which didnt help me a lot with the privacy complaints. Aramis is right. We take risks every day in our lives, and your information on lumosity has got to be one of the lowest risk ever. Your concern is right, but it should not take half the article. I’m sure you can write a book on facebook’s privacy.
Moving onto the interesting part of the article — does it improve my cognitive skills. I liked this part because it will influence me in subscribing or not. I don’t know what cognitive skills mean, but I’ve played their memory brain and I thought it was directly linked to my brain’s capacity to memorise, as I had to use a lot of brain power to picture the tiles in rectangle. Not too sure about the rest of the games, but still researching.
Well, if even if you’re not concerned with the privacy of your gaming data, you should be more concerned with the privacy of your credit card number.
They store the number, autorenew a subscription you have never requested, bill your account for 90USD without warning, and do not give refunds or allow you to delete your credit card number.
I have reported them to the California Attorney General’s Office and the Better Business Bureau. They already have several complaints.
i agree but not fully. Even though theyre JUST maths games they ARE MATHS GAMES right? practice makes perfect but i also agree with the privacy policy thing because it happened to me!
Expensive math games. That is the point: you’ll learn just as much from pretty much any puzzle game. Lumosity sells snake oil.
I checked out Lumosity after a recommendation of a friend and the site made me suspicious from the very start because it didn’t seem clear to me whether it was a free or for pay website. So, they somehow want you to trick into signing up, and then, lo and behold, there is an option to “unlock full access”. Fishy.
I also share your skepticism about the games itself. Aside from being not especially interesting, I didn’t see any conclusive proof that an improvement in one of their games meant that you have increased the performance of your brain in one particular broad area and not just one silly flash game. Heck, using their argumentation, I could argue that arranging all the books in my collection by format from big to small, and doing this over and over, will make me smarter. :P
I don´t care about the article´s part about the data, if you have opened and closed an e-mail account, the data problem is the same. I think it´s rather paranoic to live worried more about lumosity than be concerned for the messages we send to others in our everyday life.
About the second part of the article i´m a little bit surprised that after being so concerned with lumosity possibility of failure you still think intelligence its a real measurable thing. The concept of intelligence it´s very doubtful. It´s most a concept to compare people ability to accomplish very arbitrary things that include not only cognitive functions but emotions, sensations and perceptions.
I prefer to think about Lumosity as a training program to be better at some of these functions, like doing sudoku or learning one word a day.
But if the people sign up to become intelligent and overcome our personal defects and show that intelligence to others it would be better to play Call of duty that at least have stats about performance between users or everybody will end dissapointed and robbed.
The issue is that Lumosity promises increases in intelligence, and those promises are snake oil: Rather expensive flash games.
I am not very concerned about my data at Lumosity either. I just think there’s something very shady about a business model that says “we don’t share your data” and then says “we will not delete your data even if you want to”. I’d say that suggests they are in the data-selling business, and I think that should be spelled out in the terms.
But of course, this is all nothing more than a mere itch.
Do you’ve a presence on twitter? I cannot seem to come across Lumosity: a warning to users : indregard.no on the website and I would like to connect with you there. I like your writing style, thanks Sean Ruiz
Yes, there is something fishy about their business practices. They bait & Hook you. They have taken all the hyper-capitalist tricks right out of the rule book. I just feel sorry for all you suckers who don’t cancel the auto-renew immediately… obviously you all don’t buy enough porn subscriptions.
Yes, its Its worth noting Dr. Scanlon quit Standford University for somewhat rebellious reasons… and (they’re) obviously out to make money. I hate the “smell” of this part of the site.
However, none of your 1 to 2 week tests are sufficiently long, nor rigorous to give credence to your half-complaining, half-“scientificizing” about the effectiveness of the
program.
Frankly,neither is mine, yet…
BUT after 7 weeks of training 3 times a day, I went through all the baby-stages you complain about, “getting adept at the games” etc. and initially saw giant improvements in scores, moving hundreds of points in two weeks. However, it is ONLY after this “game skill” is made irrelevant, by reaching the limits of your abilities in using the interface that the REAL work begins. Then you start to move only 10 points a week. It doesn’t take only a few days, but weeks or months to cancel out gaming skill. Impatient dabblers will never see this. Likewise, their controlled lab tests were ALL done over 19 weeks or more, plenty to cancel this out, whereas your ‘trial,’ could never be.
Furthermore, I take issue with your Disclaimer that you “know statistics,” in this context, because if you had even the tiniest experience with the statistical testing of people, you would understand that humans nearly ALWAYS do better on a test the 2nd time around, which is the only way you can test a before and after scenario, now isn’t it? Its not mysterious, its the way it is testing people! Controls always do better the 2nd time. THAT is the equivalent of ‘gaming skill.’ which even if you cancel out, still shows improvement in the Lumosity users
Also, to claim that the researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Columbia, who supply the research on which EVERY one of the games is based (such as N-back: working memory, etc) aren’t practicing Science… Is just too naive and argumentative to be explainable by you being from Norway, and possibly not knowing what these cutting-edge Universities represent to Science.
I suggest your readers read this: http://www.lumosity.com/blog/the-science-behind-lumosity/ and let them come to their own conclusions about how hokey the science is.
Uhm, I think you are being bamboozled by their scientism. They have controls, yeah, and controls do not play much, the treatment group plays a lot. After a few weeks, the controls score worse than the treatment group. We can now conclude that, yes, there is a significant difference in the two groups’ average skill at these games. However, Lumo Labs claim this is due to increases in mental ability. I claim it is because the treatment group is much, much better at the games. You said it yourself: It takes weeks and months to cancel out gaming skill. Controls did not spend weeks and months.
I also find the lack of “Delete Account” feature disturbing. Seriously? $80 for some brain games? for 80 bucks, you can buy a LOT of these types of games on the net (Amazing Brain Train, Brain Booster to name a few)
Yes, it takes weeks and months to cancel out ‘gaming skill. We agree, but that doesn’t mean gaming skill accounts for all of the improvements.
Here’s one excerpt from the PDF:
”(ACTIVE) study was a large, randomized, controlled trial testing the effects of three kinds of cognitive training (Ball, et al., 2002). The 2832 participants, all 65 years of age or older, were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. One group received no training, and served as the control. The three intervention groups received either memory, reasoning, or speed of processing training. Participants in each intervention underwent approximately 10 one-hour sessions of training over about six weeks. … A number of interesting results have come out of this very large NIH-funded trial. Unsurprisingly, participants in all groups learned to perform the training tasks more efficiently. What was more impressive was that the effects of the training generalized to measures of real-world function. For example, those receiving training showed slower declines in instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) than the controls, and these differences were significant for the speed of processing and reasoning groups (Willis, et al., 2006).”
6 Weeks is plenty, they didn’t just get better at the games, but at IADLs, and it was statistically significant. Plus they were all over 65 years of age. So I’m sure it can help us, who, I’m assuming, are MUCH younger.
If you know what the NIH is, you’ll not say they’re scientificizing. Yet I’m unconvinced we, personally have any commonalities upon which to argue. Do you live in the US? Do you have any idea why that is important to the credibility of NIH, Harvard, Stanford, etc? I just don’t think you want to do your homework, which is understandable, your claims just don’t hold up to some of the research of the most eminent research Universities and Labs in the US.
However, I appreciate your dissenting voice. I just wish you could point to how training your brain would not benefit your ability to think. Do you think we’re just born how we are, without potential for change? How mediaeval. If you run, don’t you have more energy? If you lift, don’t you get stronger? That’s not rocket-science. The Brain is the same. Any other point of view is conservative, pessimistic, and defeatist.
We may agree, they need help in communication:
A job Ad for PHD to communicate scientific evidence: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sci/2417892930.html
when presented with option of inviting friends to lumosity brain train the site requested my e-mail password, dodgy-dodgy!! Games are fun but set up pseudo email a/c to play and do not give email password– unless you’ve a plan!!
lumosity is cool, but check out http://mathiqgames.com I actually learned something from playing those games
I find many of the remarks are quite valid. The encouragement of recruiting friends and use of Face Book disturbs me. When you use a social network you lose privacy. Any way I am not smarter, but the games are fun.
just to add on with recent news, now u can officially delete your account in lumosity which i see as a good thing. All u have to do is to go to the help center and go down to the question “how to i delete my account” and click and you will see the link where you can delete your account. Hope i helped :)
I´m happy that you can delete an account now but my problem now is that I wanted to remake my account and now it just says that the username is already taken!
I would like to stop all emails to my account.
Thank you