Comment by kiloaper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiloaper | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder how many Google Glasses wearers will become Life Loggers? I meet them at conferences occasionally. Some people actively avoid them. There's something about standing face to face with someone taking a photo of you every X seconds that people find really unnerving. I certainly do. Real time video is worse and it's very different to CCTV.

How long before Google collects and mines all this video like they did with Google StreetView but in realtime? Combined with the huge advances in facial recognition the privacy implementations are frightening. It reminds me of the scifi film "The Entire History of You". [1]

In the future will people who want to opt out of face recognition and tracking have to wear identifiers*, e.g. QR codes, on their person when talking to Google Glasses users, much like Google's wifi policy? [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29#3...

[2] http://searchengineland.com/google-announces-nomap-wifi-opto...

All the technology you're worried about exists and is widely used. Walk around the streets of New York City. Chances are, you're being photographed by people sharing photos online. My commute involves riding across the Brooklyn Bridge. I'm sure I ended up in 20 separate photographs today, many of which are now on Facebook. Likely with a comment about how I'm an asshole for riding my bicycle in the bicycle lane :) The underlying technology is not going to change once people start wearing cameras. If anything, the sheer volume of photographs being shared will make it less likely that the picture is of you.

As for facial recognition, anyone who can write a few lines of Perl could easily scrape social network profile photos and start matching pictures of people on the Internet to names. It's trivial. And doing this sort of thing manually is popular: search for "human flesh search engine".

Privacy in public just doesn't exist.

I wonder if (when?) it will become socially acceptable to wear masks in public. Or perhaps something like this: http://cvdazzle.com/

Or perhaps a combination - a semi-transparent mask that constantly displays shifting patterns, like Rorschach's mask.

I wasn't aware that "life loggers" actually exist. What sort of hardware are they wearing? Do they behave differently?

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