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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

I envision a possible future where people wear tracking and recording technology at all times to provide plausible counter-narratives to deep fakes.

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I hope we just do the rational thing, and rather stop treating video as if its some perfect representation of reality that's inherently trustworthy.

We've had to confront similar issues with other media earlier in history, after all.

Yet without video many terrible crimes would go unpunished. What else do you propose?

Cryptographic chain of custody from CCD to MPG, with public keys for video recording HW burned in at the factory. I don't know if that's at all feasible. Possibly only for security cameras.

No, god damn it. As soon as the cat's out of the bag, it'll forever be an arms race (there'll be attack vectors, etc.).

Let's not just establish a new proxy for implicit trust here.

What qualifies as evidence, then? Trust is important, but it can only exist long-term if there's a way to detect lies/betrayal. Anyway, I expect market forces to steamroll both of our opinions.

I don't know – but as far as I see it, that's irrelevant in pointing out that video (in and of itself) should not be trusted by virtue of being video.

The fact that you can't imagine – and I don't provide – any alternative proposition does not make implicitly trusting video a good proposition.

But, yeah, I suspect reality will probably disappoint us both...

Uh, right, implicitly trusting video because it's video is definitely dumb. I don't think that's what I'm proposing. Trusting cryptography, as long as you're explicit about what you're doing and how it can fail, is at least not immediately foolish.

It has nothing to do with the medium of video, but with establishing trust.

We'll need to deal with video the same way we do with images, audio, and eye witness accounts. The way to do that is to establish a measure of trust in some quantifiable or methodological way, rather than just trusting the medium.

Google Glass tried that. Even with an obvious indicator of recording, some people still believed that anyone wearing Google Glass was recording 24/7. There's no way that'd fly in modern society.

Recording indicators are doomed to fail, as people want a not-recording indicator. The only obvious and reliable one is having the camera out of sight.

In any downtown area you are on camera 24/7. I think the expectations of privacy have changed. Google glasses released on mass now would not make similiar headlines.

'downtown areas' have been on camera for decades, certainly by the time google glass was released, so i don't think this is really a useful data point.

Go to a public area and visibly record people. Particularly while talking to them. You will annoy a lot of people and some will act with hostility (especially if you don't frame it as some sort of interview).

People don't like it when nobodies are filming them, even in very public spaces. For some reason they are ok with CCTV, despite that not being much different (I do recognize that cctv is typically recording a general area and isn't always HQ)

I think people don't mind being recorded but they want to know why. If the reason becomes because a big name company does it automatically we generally accept. For example people now accept amazon / google listening to background conversations in order to process commands.

I agree. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if “civilian” bodycams become the norm in public in the next ten years. It’s just a matter of making them convenient and fashionable enough.

We already do. It's called a cell phone.

But at least my cellphone doesn't track my every movement and my surroundings to enable me to defend against unfounded accusations and deepfakes, it does so to help Google sell ads.

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