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Comment by drcube | Hacker News Reader

Actually, I think privacy concerns could be alleviated by something like this. It's just so much information, getting anything useful is like taking a sip from a fire hose.

Imagine your hypothetical break in is in downtown Manhattan. Do you really expect law enforcement to sift through video data of the hundreds of thousands of people who fit that profile? How would they know if someone's feed was missing? Basically, there's so much noise, the signal effectively gets lost.

Granted, big data applications could be brought to bear on the problem, but then it's the same cat and mouse game criminals and police have been playing forever.

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I don't envision this being a problem at all. First, its easy enough to have a checkbox that says "I saw it, here's the feed you want." (In all likelihood, if anybody committed a crime in downtown Manhattan where hundreds of people were around, the cops wouldn't have any need to ask the public for data anyway.)

If nobody saw it (or doesn't know what they were looking at, as would usually be the case if they saw a getaway car), I still don't think there will be a firehose of data. The feed will already be geotagged and time stamped, making it easy to sift through by hand. Plus, much of this can be automated, even with the relatively rudimentary recognition software we have now.

A lot of security falls into that "firehose" analogy. Your door lock is relatively trivial to brute-force. What is preventing thieves from entering your house is that you live surrounded by other targets.

Problem with the Glass approach is that we now require police to sit through videos, but eventually it will be easier to mine all the data with algorithms, especially if we get better at facial recognition, etc...

Personally, i don't mind a glass-pervasive society. I worry about the fact that all the data goes around a single company's infrastructure and the fact that, for this specific company, hardware is a commodity and data is what they are after.

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