Hacker News Reader

Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Is this discussion any different than the one we had a couple decades ago when credit/debit cards went from occasional use to primary currency? There was huge outcry about how everyone would be tracked, how every purchase you made could be aggregated and monitored and tracked and sold and leveraged, how personal problems could arise when a spouse or lawyer saw inappropriate purchases on bank card records, etc etc. Today, we still acknowledge those problems - while using those cards, having just given in to the sheer convenience of its regardless of the data mining that occurs.

I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data.

View on HN

>I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data.

I've thought about this a lot (because my startup wants to move into this space in a year or so, depends on the progression of wearables like glass) and have drawn the conclusion that the reason the facebooks and googles of the world while being technically capable of executing such an idea, they might see as even trying to do such (based on them basically creating walled gardens around information of which one needs to create an identity to access) would amount to a public flogging of them and maybe no clear way to monetize such capabilities now (just look at foursquare stumbling along trying to do such, and that's without facial recog).

But as you note, the technology is here, it's only a matter of time before someone can adopt such and gain usage by the masses. I personally think that the data collected from such if made publicly available, will make the the outcry over surveillance state moot since such capabilities are slowly creeping their way to the masses… I can only imagine the outcry from the church when the printing press started to take hold in its abilities to spread information to the masses…

Surveillance carried out by individuals and corporations, even if universally available, doesn't make surveillance by governments any less bad. The printing press was an instrument of giving; surveillance is an instrument of taking.

I didn't say anything about it becoming "less bad", just that the discussions will mostly be purely academic and of little value to the avg person (to them gov surveillance < miley cyrus|beyonce|justin beiber|shinny new iphone app|that college degree) surrounding those capabilities under the situation I put forth, especially if such masses find any utility in having access to such information.

Edit for 1st comment: Looks like 4sq found it… and I'm sure there's room for others to follow… http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/foursquare-revenues/

While true, I would imagine it is much easier for a good number of people to go cash only to avoid that, as opposed to never driving a car again.

Then when face recognition kicks in, never going out in public. Might be an opportunity in there somewhere for selling comfortable face masks.

I'm curious when we'll start seeing people dressing like this:

http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear

Hopefully never; discounting war and other emergencies, it's a waste of material. The moment people wearing such things become an issue, the government or a company will get few undergrads to fix the image recognition algorithm and boom, all the protection is gone in the blink of an updating flash memory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com