I wrote this back on April 24th 2005 for Glimpse of Tommorow and thought it needed to be revisited in this space and in this context.

What happens when we all record our existence 24 hours a day seven days a week? When privacy comes only in controlled environments and any public venue is an always on recorded experience. “I’m ready for my close up Mr. Deville.” This radical change to society is little understood by the general populace and the reaction that seems to be the strongest is a pervasive fear of the loss of privacy. Unfortunately this like the whole genetics debate is like Pandora trying to close the lid after the problems has escaped, but just like in the myth we still have hope. The debate needs to move beyond the initial phase of how to stop the loss of privacy into the reality of how to regulate this new cyber society. It is no longer a question of if this will happen but how soon.
We need to start a dialog on where to set the taboo bar. As an example it is a future date and Professor Steve Mann’s vision of putting a camera in a contact lens is a reality. We are now able to use a wireless feed from your contact to a wearable computer which records your daily life. This makes the obvious shoulder mounted video camera a thing of the past. At any time any place you could be recorded and you would never even realize it. Some taboo recording environments are easy to define, bathrooms, locker rooms others are not so easy to define. Defining these rules of recorded existence is what we should be debating and trying to define what is a realistic expectation of privacy.

We have a great many legal battles yet to be fought over what is an expectable right to privacy. Is it admissible in court for my “surveillance” video of you selling drugs on the street? What about through that open window if I see you using drugs in your house? What is my legal recourse if you film me without my knowledge and then distribute that video for profit? What if Paris didn’t know she was being filmed? Where are we free to do all the personal events in our own lives without it showing up on the Internet?

Right now in London and many other cities around the world our existence in public is already being recorded. If you were so privileged as to go to a Super Bowl or other major event recently then you were recorded and run through visual recognition systems to look for the “bad” guys. One of the unexpected side affects of the camera phone explosion is the number of purse snatching and other crimes where a picture of the criminal is e-mailed to the police; smile your on Candid Camera. The reality of the matter is we are already well on our way to this existence and we must take a look at our irrational fears and or very rational concerns.

The price point on storage has gotten so low that a terabyte in our pockets is soon to be so inexpensive that we can literally record every moment of the day. I just wonder who is going to sit down and edit a full days worth of video in real time. Final Cut Pro, Avid or Premier will be software that many more people will become conversant with, we should by stock. Let’s just hope all video-mail isn’t a series of star wipes and quick fades, you know it will be. At this point the shear amount of video will overfill the pocket and move into the home and office can any one say doggabyte.

What I see is a booming market for video scanning systems that use visual recognition to pull up what the user is looking for. Another configuration is a unique time code based system that runs the extent of a human life for quick reference to John Does life video.

The way to deal with this coming change is not to try and litigate ourselves back in time, but to come up with boundaries and imaginative solutions to these issues. What can we do to put safe guards in place in designated no video areas? Would it not make sense to develop counter measures to scramble any video recording in these predefined areas? We now have companies like Netline who have developed cell phone jamming technology or cellular firewalls to prohibit the use of such devices in areas where security is a concern or something as mundane as a movie theater. We already have patents filed for the “Personal Video Surveillance Disrupting Device” and others that are geared towards jamming or detecting jamming devices.

Want to know more about cellular or video jamming check out these articles:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2092059/
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/story1a092200.html
 http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~art511_j/emerging.1999.f/Patent%20Proposals/disruptingsurveillance.jc,ih/PersonalVideoSurveillanceDis.htm

[tags]LIVE!, Video Scrambling, Glimpse of Tommorow, surveillance, privacy, allways on recording[/tags]