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Imagine the futuristic world of 1890!

You walk past a cafe and outside is a big sign, "Half off coffee!" And the awesome thing about Big Sign Technology is that it doesn't break your concentration: If you are intently listening to the organ grinder on the street corner, or talking with your friends about that new Oscar Wilde play, it does not interrupt you.

Then you meet a person on the street. For a whole millisecond you don't know who they are. But then your built-in mechanism for recognizing human faces - which has been QA tested on monkeys for millions of years - kicks in and tells you that this is a friend, analyzes their emotions based on their face, clothing, and tone, and shows you details about their life which you have been storing in your long-term "memory", along with (among other things) customer ratings for that cafe you just passed. This amazing internal "memory" is searchable and is indexed according to useful criteria like place, time, emotional state, and relevance - for example, as you are about to take a bite of that apparently tasty snack, your "memory system" will helpfully remind you that the last sausage you ate made you violently ill.

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For all its amusement value, though, this comment is certainly a pitch-perfect illustration of the Google mentality. It's like watching Martians learn to dance. "We do not understand the odd periodic motions of these hu-mans, but we believe that we can reduce their motivations to a series of ones and zeroes." This attitude is undeniably effective, sometimes, but it has real limitations. As when, for example, Professor Frink tries to exchange all of my privacy for a bunch of "features" that my great-grandparents were born with.

boring! I forget faces. I forget if I liked a certain place to eat. I want to see what the people inside think of the food. I want to see someones face, and a summary come up next to it saying "You forgot to reply to their email, their husband just left them, they know java, they're conservative" etc

Human memory is really pretty sketchy and lame. It worked well when all we had to do was hunt and have babies, but it simply doesn't cut it any more.

Why don't we just chip everybody? It would save us carrying the gadget that helps us remember people.

Also, there is a reason you didn't reply to their email. No use pretending otherwise for you or them.

> Most people just don't care one bit.

Most people don't know about the issue and it's implications. It's not the same.

Also, most of the few that do know are filled with FUD from people with economic or political interests in destroying privacy.

I disagree. There's a pretty clear trend of people actively making more of their private life public.

The people 'destroying privacy' are the general population posting the minute details of their life on the internet for all to see. They want to.

The FUD I've seen has been from the other side. "They harvest your personal details and then sell them". That's just idiotic. Why should I care if a company collects some data on me and sells it? (As long as it was collected via legal means). Them selling information on me doesn't affect me in any way.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/faceboo...

>Privacy isn't a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It's about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It's about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me "public by default, private when necessary" but this doesn't suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

The people 'destroying privacy' are the general population posting the minute details of their life on the internet for all to see. They want to.

What really annoys me is when my family and friends post many of the minute details of my life on their pages (e.g. Facebook, twitter). Welcome to the wonderful world of "collateral damage." :-(

That's absolutely not cool. Instead of seeing the world as it is, you'll be seeing numbers, urls and random ads. You'll be heavily influenced by these devices, and it'll be just a matter of time before you stop thinking for yourself and let the device think for you, thus leaving the owners of the content that is being displayed in a position of power.

Sure, i may have dramatized it, but i certainly don't like where we're headed to in terms of privacy.

The sad part is, the next generation of people won't give a damn about privacy, because they'll be accustomed to the lack of it. I think it's already a bit like that.

>> "You'll be heavily influenced by these devices, and it'll be just a matter of time before you stop thinking for yourself and let the device think for you"

I'm pretty sure people have said this about every technological advance.

I believe the reality will be that we can stop thinking about useless wasteful mundane things, and spend more time thinking about things that really matter.

Like where you are walking perhaps?

I keep getting an image from Wall-E stuck in my head. The carts aren't there because they are fat. They are there because with all this distraction you can't walk straight.

I'm pretty sure people have said this about every technological advance.

Turns out they were partially right about the television, weren't they?

No. TV is great (Not in US).

Did everyone suddenly stop using facebook because a few vocal people worried about privacy a month or so back? nope. Most people just don't care one bit.

Among my set of friends, I saw a lot of people remove personal data (e.g. employer, location, mobile number), clean up their friends lists and generally tighten things up.

People have expanded their sphere of privacy to include their friends - e.g. like living in a village where everyone knows all the gossip. But it's a village, not a city...

...augmented reality visors/goggles bluetoothed to your smartphone with useful advertising...

...walking down the street and an advert shows above a cafe saying "half off coffee today"...

...You could walk up to your friend, the goggles/smartphone would recognize their face as being your friend, analyze their emotions, show you their details next to their face...

That's nice, but I'm holding out for the flying cars and warp drive.

A very small niche worry about things like this.

And rightly so. Have you seen Erasing David? http://erasingdavid.com/ .

I think the analyze emotions thing might work. Everyone with a facebook/twitter profile will have a little floating icon above their head in augmented reality world though.