Lifelogging is dead for now | Hacker News Reader

Lifelogging is dead for now

computerworld.com

73 pointskurthamm58 comments

There's a life log built into Google Maps. It's called Timeline and it's pretty neat. It annotates your raw location history with the names of places you've been and the photos you took while you were there. It's a nice benefit for those of us who don't mind letting Google store our location history.

https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

Yeah, I shut that trash off years ago. I love keeping records of my own. I don't love the government having a permanent record of everywhere I've ever been over the last ten years.

Won't they have your phone mast history as a good second go ?

Cell phone location history won't tell you nearly as much. They can generally say which town I'm in, what part of town even. But I could at any point be in hundreds of different buildings at any point from the history of what towers I'm connected to.

Meanwhile, Google location history pinpoints you to an exact address give or take every five minutes.

They'll have much better accuracy than you think.

You're connected to one at a time but frequently checking for more appropriate towers in case of signal outages.

Using this they could triangulate you quite precisely.

The question there is your use of "could". Is this something they can do if they want to know about you specifically, or something they're already doing (and storing) for all users?

The ability to decide to track down one person right now for criminal justice purposes is not nearly as concerning as just being able to request anyone's precise location history going back a decade.

Interactive map rebuilding the location of a German green party representative over 6 months:

http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten

He sued the Deutsche Telekom to get access to the data. As you can see from the strength and orientation of the communicating antenna, they can basically build again your complete life. So, your phone company knows a lot about you and most likely even more than that as you are most likely using their DNS server to resolve the websites you access using your mobile connection.

They still do, don't worry.

When it comes to state surveillance, you're in one of two groups: Either you're a target, in which case they already know everything about you and turning off location history in Google isn't going to accomplish anything, -or- you're not a target in which case nobody cares about your location history.

Well if you are not a target right now, you could always become one. So it does matter to turn off location history.

And even if you are a target right now, you probably do not know this. So you still want to turn off location history.

I am not sure what you are saying, it sounds very smart, but it isn't ?

What I'm saying: If the Government (or anyone of consequence really) wants to know where you are, your phone's location history setting isn't going to save you.

And more than likely nobody cares where you are because like everyone else, you don't matter.

It's the old argument against conspiracy theories: If you actually knew something damaging to the Government and they really wanted you dead, they have numerous ways to accomplish that, none of which are affected by you living in the desert with a tinfoil hat.

I think the point is that the NSA allegedly infected air-gapped Iranian nuclear facilities (i.e. Stuxnet), so if they see you as a target they already have a trojan hiding on your phone (a much easier target than Iranian nuclear equipment) and transmitting your location directly to them, regardless of whether or not you enabled location history. Therefore if you are attempting to prevent government surveillance by turning off location history, you are wasting your effort and may as well turn it back on and enjoy the advantages.

That said I don't believe in making their job easier, nor in giving out my info to non-government hackers nor to advertisers, so I have location history disabled.

Interesting! When I log in, it only shows the timeline from when I had an android phone. It does not show anything since I've owned a Windows Phone and now and iPhone. Might be a good thing.

I absolutely would like to record everything but I'm not prepared for all that data to live in the cloud and belong to some untrustworthy tech giant.

What about a questionably trustworthy tech startup?

Theoretically yes. Practically I'd be very surprised if such a tech startup would have terms I would trust. Things I'd be looking at:

* data ownership - including in the event the startup is bought

* data access revocation - I want to be able to revoke access to my data in a meaningful way

* business plan - I want to be the customer not the product for something like this

* portability - I don't want to feel that I'm stuck using any one solution for my life.

I really don't know if such a service can be made economically viable given such a set of requirements.

Take a look Su Sandstorm.

What is that? I can't (easily) tell what it is that you are trying to suggest looking at.

I think they mean Sandstorm.io

Sandstorm pretty much meets those requirements:

* Your data is exportable

* They focus on security and have a non-privacy-invading business plan

* You can decide exactly who to share data with, and revoke it.

It's like a private hosted cloud - you have to pay for it yourself (once it's out of beta), but you could host it yourself, and it's open source.

https://sandstorm.io

I built Socialite.ooo, it really needs a mobile app, but it's a site for keeping track of and taking notes on people, events, and locations (correlating them). Business model is paid (haven't implemented that yet) so that there will be no selling of data.

I'd love to do something with a fully encrypted system, but the usability / recovery trade offs just didn't seem worth it when designing the site.

I work and am pursuing my master's, so I haven't had a ton of time to build an app for it.

Cloudron.io fits the bill for all your requirements.

There are quite a few replies to this talking about interesting directions for applications and platforms, all of which are great and very interesting, but none of which currently seem to offer much of a story for multimedia life logging.

Zero knowledge encryption's adaption is on the rise, seems like an ideal use-case to me. It will be restrictive or rather complex and will require more work but if you want to work with this kind of data, this should be a requirement imo (in the future).

To the best of my knowledge this is the holdup. We need an encrypted cloud. One we know only we have the keys to. There will be no data mining beyond users mining themselves, when it comes to privacy, with the line drawn by the user, not the provider.

Check out librevault, it does encrypted file sync using a DHT to find peers, allows for encrypted-only nodes which cannot decrypt your files (so you can throw them up on cheap VPSes, or friend's machines without worry) and in a nice open source package. Only catch so far is that the file indexing seemed kind of slow compared to SyncThing last time I tried it.

What happens when your own security fails and now your data is released to the cloud forever?

Or the data is warranted by a judge in a civil or family case?

I'm genuinely surprised that so many people are interested in logging every detail of their lives. It seems like the obsession with collecting memories on your hard drive is a great way to never collect any of them in your head

It seems like the obsession with collecting memories on your hard drive is a great way to never collect any of them in your head.

I don't see why. Once you have a working setup, life logging can take less time and effort than manually taking pictures with your phone.

Totally agree. Funny to see people filming stuff, looking through their screen, instead of actually looking directly at the scene. Tend to not remember it doing the former.

If you are more concerned with taking pictures than being in the moment and absorbing the gestalt of the experience, then yes. That being said, a photographic log of particularly salient experiences can provide retrieval cues down the line to help you re-live and re-enjoy them.

My best Life Log is my pictures and videos taken with my phone, available both in chronological order and somewhat organized into topic collections (Google Photos only). I set my phone to wait until I am on wifi and then send copies to Google Photos, Microsoft Onedrive, and Dropbox. (I delete a lot of pictures soon after I take them if I don't want them in my permanent collection). I have the same time ordered collection on one of my laptops and back everything up occasionally to DVRs.

I use this time ordered photo stream a lot. When I am traveling, sitting in an airport and don't feel like working at the moment, I like to jump back to some point in time and look through the pictures for a few month interval. Refreshes my memory and I enjoy remembering time with family and friends, travel, etc.

Every 2m a snapshot of my desktop gets taken through cron for personal review later. Would be nice if I had a similar minimally socially invasive tool away from my computer. Perhaps I can just use my memory for that.

I tried doing that for a while, but I just encountered the problems the article mentioned instead of getting any benefit from it.

Now I just use RescueTime instead.

Cool, that made me think about somehow combining the screenshots with the data from RescueTime. That could actually make regular screenshots like that useful and searchable instead of useless and bothersome.

what possible use could that have?

Could be a contractor billing by the hour. Plenty of people track their time this way.

This is actually the area of research for my honours thesis. Many of the points made here are very valid - there is simply so much personal data being generated and there is no way to access it in a meaningful way.

One great thing about the current state of technology is you'll have a picture of your kid virtually every week of their life.

When I was a kid, the camera would get lugged out for occasions like birthdays.

Now I have more pictures of my kids than days in their lives.

I think it's great. There's even metadata to tell you where and when the pic was taken.

I think this increase of frequency is interesting too. But sometimes it does dilute the meaning of the pictures, and no one have time to sort out 1000+ pictures from the last year to make into one coherent album telling a story. They resort to 'auto-curate' that's based on their network's reaction to the post (e.g. those 5 top posts of the year on instagram), not the moment or their story itself.

Surely a job for machine learning? There's enough metadata to spin a short narrative:

- We went to Legoland when you turned 4, here's the pics of the day...

- Here's a toad we came across on the way home from school one day...

sure it's probably easier for vacation/location based narrative (picks ones that are far away from home). But maybe it can learn to pick more interesting data too (first picture of your child standing up/first video of them walking). Or last pictures of someone with you.. After thinking about it, yeah it might be a job for machine learning.

Lifelogging reminds me of this episode of Black Mirror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You

Now I don't know how much it was based on Gordon Bell's/Vannevar Bush's idea or if it's simply a big coincidence.

Thought about this as well. I agree that the concept of using electronics to create a sort of "prosthetic" photographic memory is interesting but going with the theme of the series, it did an interesting job of dramatizing the potential pitfalls of being able to rewind and review everything you say or do. I liked that wasn't even about conspiracies or surveillance but rather the way that sort of access to the past can allow you to dwell on it and constantly second-guess yourself and past actions.

I always wondered what would happen to violent crime if everyone logged what happens? (If there is no obvious camera, it would be enough if 10-15% logged, for the risk to increase.)

A button sends the last minute of everything that happened to the police, along with GPS coordinates (preferably with a face recognition service)?

If your voice is needed to turn off logging, it will be obvious what happened, when knock out drugs are used in bars.

And so on.

See The Circle by David Eggers for a fictional account. I'm not sure I really recommend the book as SF, but it's an interesting read if taken as a deliberately over-the-top "if this goes on" sort of fable.

Selective enforcement goes through the ceiling, as there's suddenly far more "crime" than anyone knows what to do with.

Yes, but add face recognition and it will be easy court cases...

I see new services for the future:

+ Upload services that gets video checksums every second (and maybe a picture every 30 seconds), so you can prove that this video was not tampered with.

+ Jamming equipment, so criminals can stop information from leaving the victim (then destroy the logging hardware.)

+ Cheap, fast flying drones that can leave a person being robbed, to send video/audio/alarm to the police outside the previously mentioned jamming radius.

That reminds me of the SF short story about the invention of a machine that could play any past event like a movie on TV and how it transformed society.

Imagine a world where anyone could play back any moment of anyone's life (living or dead) at any time, unedited.

http://www.ebooktrove.com/Asimov,%20Isaac/Asimov,%20Isaac%20...

The Dead Past by Asimov.

I also recommend this story for a very refreshing view on government agencies.

(Spoiler alert)

The issue with such a device is not being able to see people's lives unedited, but that "the past" also means "a microsecond ago" - which turns that device into an ultimate spying/voyeur tool.

I think it is important to focus on Bell's motives: he wanted to augment his physical memory with a digital record of his life.

There are other strategies that are manual and thus miss a lot of information, but does it really matter? I use org-mode type shared files for notes, and sometimes use of Google Keep and Evernote for research notes. I also toss all PDF files for interesting conference papers, monthly ACM issues, eBooks I have bought into a folder that is searchable on my laptop and I keep a copy on Google Drive so I can find stuff if I don't have my own laptop with me.

It is a tradeoff: how much time to spend archiving potentially useful stuff vs. the long term benefit of having this stuff available.

Hard drives are so cheap why not DIY? The article implies TB of data but I find that dubious.

Every 30s would amount to 2880 times * x Mbyte per day. Which would mean 2 Gbyte per day. If you have a movie at 12 FPS you could get it down to 12 Gbyte per day.

I have a feeling 8 hours of pitch black video compresses to even less. So at the lowest resolutions and framerates maybe you have 1gb of video per day. That's around 2 and a half years per tb. You can buy 5 tb drives for under 300 dollars. That means you can do video for 14 years. With backups and all the hardware, this entire project could cost less than 1000usd.

I don't know. http://getnarrative.com/ seems pretty popular!

They went through some rough times this summer (bankruptcy/re-org) [1] and have secured some new funding [2].

Also interesting, because they are based in Sweden, you can get a look into some of their financials as well[3].

Anyone from @narrative care to comment on this?

[1] - http://blog.getnarrative.com/2016/07/narrative-initiates-a-c...

[2] - http://blog.getnarrative.com/2016/07/first-round-of-funding-...

[3] - http://www.allabolag.se/5568709520/Narrative_AB

Depends on your definition of lifelogging I guess, I would argue that most lifelogging happens on Facebook now. Most people don't want to automatically share every detail about their lives, they want to present a filtered, sanitized version that serves as a personal narrative.

Yeah, definitely depends on definition. If you mean publishing/broadcasting, then sure. That can and should be something you curate and choose what things you want to share about yourself rather than an all-or-nothing situation.

But there's the possibility of using it as a sort of glorified journal as well. As someone already mentioned that Black Mirror episode where this is explored along with the pitfalls of living in the past or constant second-guessing I'll skip that angle.

Still, in a more positive light, using tech to automatically journal some things (places you've been, time spent doing various activities, things you've seen, etc) at least has the potential to benefit. Maybe it's something as simple as trying to remember a place your visited or maybe it's a real eye-opener when you see just how much time you spend sitting in traffic. Either way, there are definitely some potential uses that go beyond the "liveblog/broadcast every second of your life" thing.

A few people in the early days of Justin.tv (now just known as Twitch) would "LifeCast", one of the more popular broadcasters ended up working for Twitch.

It's not dead; NSA have simply taken over the responsibility

Computer World still exists?

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