Imagine walking down the street with a small camera embedded in a pair of glasses (with a computer display also embedded in them so you have things like a virtual ‘holographic’ mobile phone, a full sized webbrowser floating in the air, etc… computers effectively stop being physical devices at that point. The camera is used to recognize where your hands are so you can operate the virtual devices) or even contact lenses.

However some percentage of the population opts to run some daemon or app in the background, some computer vision software detects faces of the people they walk past, it uploads this to a database, pattern recognition software can mine this database for all the other photos of that person. If you are interested in someone you see, it can pull out every other picture that anyone else wearing the system has taken. It would be fairly easy to find out where someone lives, works, the routes they frequent, where they shop, etc… The software can just keep streaming pictures to the web so if you want to see who lives in the house you just have to watch the feeds of nearby GPS coordinates until someone running the spy software walks past the house at the same moment as the person is leaving or entering. (actually the feed watching could also be done by pattern recognition).

Even if it’s outlawed, the database doesn’t have to be run by some specific company or entity. It can be hosted on the cloud in a distributed, anonymous, p2p manner.

I’m sure Tracy learnt something new about Facebook privacy.
http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/95727/my+other+pussy+public+facebook+fail/

You have an interesting idea about home security. If your alarm system had access to the crime stats in you area and could tell you that there has been severalburglaries so you should set your alarm that would be very useful.

http://www.exothermia.net/monkeys_and_robots/2009/04/27/cloudmirror/

You see, it’s interesting to geo-tag a picture from your vacations, a picnic or from your last trek in the forest. However, when you take a picture of your new TV, your dog or from your kid playing in your backyard, geo-tagging is useless and dangerous. There’s not much harm in geo-tagging a photo of your house. I mean, it’s not a real secret anyway. Easily obtained and well.. relatively harmless.

I don’t think that privacy is really the problem. The problem is that people do not share responsibly. Last week, I saw a disturbing exchange of facebook post of someone having couple problem. There was people insulting each other publicly, sharing all their problems with everyone. They do not realize that these things can be easily tracked by anybody – your boss, your friends, your coworkers, everyone. I even saw personalities reply to each others furiously in Twitter updates. All this is not healthy. People must learn to share more responsibly.

The other thing I’d like to share is that we must not forget that security will also go up as technology progress. Alarm system will eventually become more and more advanced and customizable. Imagine if the police could have access to this information too. A computer could automatically generate a danger map on the most probable victim of burglary depending on who is at home and who is not. They could then deploy their patrol more precisely. It’s just an example, it might not be a good idea. It’s just a way for me to explain that, as technology progress, not only bad things will happen.

Want to discuss?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by AugmentedPlanet: Do You Care About Privacy? – http://tinyurl.com/yb5h8zw #AR #AUGMENTEDREALITY…