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     The question is, what does this actually 
     mean to society?

It can go both ways, depending on other factors like ... are people going to get punished for doing weird things, for not being normal? Also, once the detection of tax-evasion becomes easier, are taxes going to get lowered once everybody will pay their taxes? It might happen.

In our country during communism, phones were constantly wiretapped. The secret service also had countless informants that were sending reports on their neighbors on anything they deemed "suspicious". Basically anyone of your neighbors could be an informant and so everybody was watching their backs constantly.

Personally I'm not that worried about technology, because a police state can spy on its citizens just fine without any of this modern technology: they just need informants and a big militia force to read and act on those reports. And believe me when I say that this method is extremely effective ;)

Quite the contrary, with modern technology regular people can use secure communication channels that can't be wiretapped, something which wasn't possible in my country during communism.

These problems (privacy, other freedoms) are always social problems, not technological problems. Technology always provides a balance ... if face recognition will be able to identify you with high accuracy, you will also be able to detect all the photos of you that have ever been uploaded and send take-down notices or other such requests. If Facebook still identifies you, you can sue them into oblivion. If your Facebook communication is not secure, you can always have a conversation over an encrypted channel. Etc...

I question how much privacy really did exist before the modern era of large cities and impersonal lives.

When we all lived within spitting distance of our families in a single common room, and everyone in town knew you from birth to death, how much different was life then from now?

Will the 'erosion' of privacy really just return us to a state that we (humanity) have previously been in?

The key difference is they traded privacy for personal trust and rapport. When you live in the same foxhole with your entire family and are always interacting with the same small community, trust is built up over time. You knew everybody in a personal way, not just as an abstract notion of a person on the other side of the world.

The way we're heading, we'll have neither personal trust nor privacy. It's not JUST the lack of privacy that's a problem, it's the fact that any stranger can know everything there is to know about you. In a small community, everybody has to have good working relationships with everybody else or the community dies. On the internet, not everybody has your best interests in mind.

There's also the issue that information is easily spread "virally" online. The information that is actively spread though tends to be stuff that is outrageous or scandalous (often taken out of context) or whatever rather than the positive but boring stuff.

Star wars kid could probably cure cancer, but he'd still be "the star wars kid" to most people.

I think the issue is that if we know only one thing about you, that one thing is your label.

I see a policeman on TV, he's a 'cop'. Sure he may be a father, avid sci-fi junkie, and so on, but all I see is one dimension.

If Star Wars Kid cured cancer, we wouldn't forget about his light saber antics but we'd add that to our impression of him----now he's a nobel winning scientist, with an impressive intellect, who has saved potentially billions of lives..... oh and in his youth he used to geek out on Youtube.

True, something of that magnitude would probably change expectations. But what if you are just a good software developer or something like that?

The policeman example is interesting, what happens in a society where a policeman is trying to be taken seriously and discourage you from some activity you are doing but your glasses automatically recognise his face and say "hey, I see you are being harassed by the police, these naked pictures leaked by his ex-wife might be of use to you".

A more useful feature would be for the device to automatically stream video to an off-site location whenever it recognizes a policeman, badge, or vehicle.

Perhaps, but in past times you would live your life in a small community of people who would "know" you and would know all kinds of both positive and negative things about you.

What you are looking at in the future is the possibility of having people all over the world who don't really know you at all making judgements about you based on incomplete (even if still comprehensive) and possibly out of context information.

For example "cyber bullying" where what would once be bullying from perhaps a small group of people at a school can be escalated into cases of kids having thousands of hateful messages from people who they have never met posted on their facebook wall or their pictures turned into memes or whatever. For example the "star wars kid".

For example: Imagine going for a job interview in another country and having the interviewer say "you're that idiot who did X" because that is basically how you are known to the world despite your meaningful work in some unrelated area.

A question I'd have is when is reputation more sticky? When you have small pieces of information about another person and don't really know them outside of that 1 dimension? Or when you have a holistic image of them yet for one reason or another its tilted towards like or dislike?

For example, I think in small towns the pariahs and those dubbed 'weird' have a harder time getting rid of their reputation and there was always far more pressure to conform than there is today.

I would imagine the holistic image would be more sticky since that is the one more likely to be shared by a large number of people and is usually the more "exciting" view.

When you become well known in a small town for some particular thing which may give you a bad reputation you have the option to move away or wait for time to fade that reputation somewhat. On the internet there will be hard evidence in existence for perpetuity.

Privacy from family members and privacy from strangers are not the same thing and I venture say that people value the latter much more than the former.

Edit: And besides, in small knit societies the lack of privacy is reciprocal. It's not the same thing as having a small group of people who control massive data centers and have the capability to pick up on some dirt on anyone within hours of requesting it.

Oh I agree, but the future world we're facing is that everyone will have a little dirt on everyone else due to the proliferation of material---the example in the comment I responded to was your friends and family being fed a feed of your tripping on the street because a stranger tagged it as 'lol funny'.

I've often had the same thought. I suspect that the pre-internet big-city age will end up being a blip on the historical "ease of acquiring real privacy/anonymity people had" graph.

There's too much pressure from both sides. Companies, governments, etc, all want to know, and lots of people want to share.

I think the future will be one of (social, at least) privacy through getting lost in the huge sea of people instead of privacy through actual anonymity.

There's a line to be drawn between, "privacy from people who are actively looking at you to find something about you" and "privacy from computer algorithms that will make decisions about you based on your personal activities"

Whilst it is likely that you will get "lost in a sea of people" for the most part, it's also quite likely that you will "stick out" in one way or another and this might not be in a way you like or even in a way that is necessarily fair.

Personally I think this development is actually a good direction. People need to feel the pain before they react.

So far privacy has mostly been attributed to "some internets movements". But if everyone (incl. politicians and their families) are impacted, privacy should hopefully become a more central issue for policy makers.

I will be very interested to see the effect when the "privacy watershed" event happens. Which I'd be amazed if it didn't happen sometime within the next 10 years or so.

By that I mean something on the scale of the entire facebook database being exposed or a gigantic number of personally identifiable google searches being released.

It may not even be something that happens due to malicious activity, it could be a company choosing to do something with data that impacts a large number of people's lives in a very direct way.

I will be very interested to see the effect when the "privacy watershed" event happens.

I would put money on nothing happening.

There have been large scale credit card leaks before, without any real lasting impact.

There have been "facebook stalking" murders.

What privacy violation could possibly be worse? I suppose genocide based on something in some online profile is theoretically possible, but even in countries where there is risk of state-sponsored attacks on people based on their online profiles (Egypt, Iran, Syria etc) there has been no real change in behaviour.

"People" (speaking in averages here) seem comfortable enough (or too lazy to do anything about) with companies knowing pretty much everything there is about them, even in the worst circumstances possible.

I would guess that most people don't quite grasp what the data could be used for and assume that it more secure than it (probably) is. people also seem to assume that stuff that is marked "private" on facebook is actually private in the sense that nobody will ever be able to access it.

Stalking murders I imagine are pretty rare and will only affect a small number of people, even so I imagine people who know people who have been murdered because of facebook are somewhat more skeptical of it.

Having your credit card stolen isn't actually such a big deal, you can usually just cancel, get a new one and have the fraudulent charges reversed.

Having stuff like your preferences in porn or the conversations between you and the person you are cheating on your spouse shown off to the world, that stuff can hurt.

Should we make an effort to produce technology to help people cheat on their spouses and not get caught? I'm not saying you're off-base, but pick better examples.

I agree. Today people are more interested in being famous than being private. Thank the tabloids.

If it turns out there is a compelling public interest, I think privacy could be protected by law rather than disappearing. For instance, it could become illegal to operate a facial recognition database except for research purposes. No doubt this wouldn't be perfect, but it could help to restore balance if certain technologies are deemed to be more harm than good.

This would be hard to implement, what with organisations being able to move their actual database to other locations around the world. You would need an international treaty.

Not to mention that it would stifle all kinds of things, for example the kinect uses facial recognition to recognise different people. The public would not support this sort of legislation if it meant all their fun stuff got thrown away.

Besides people could still keep databases, just locked away in encrypted partitions.

This is what I meant when I said it wouldn't be perfect. There are serious challenges, as you have pointed out.

In the case of kinect, perhaps small "friends and family" personal use databases could still be allowed. But large-scale databases (e.g. millions of faces) to recognize any person could be prohibited. This way, your xbox and whatever personal devices can recognize you for fun, but random strangers cannot.

Sure, but you now have to draw an exact line between "friends and family" and "large-scale database". It has to something watertight enough to work against companies with big legal teams too.

Also, what happens if I move my "friends and family" database to a cloud provider?

We could define a "friends and family" database as a device-local database limited to recognizing up to n people. Any database that can recognize > n people, or is made accessible over a network, would be prohibited. This would allow for your devices to be trained to recognize you, but prevent this information from being stored in aggregate within "the cloud".

You seem to assume that companies would be determined to circumvent the law. I am not convinced this is the case. For instance, I'm pretty sure Google and some other companies have actually held back certain face-based technologies simply because it's creepy, even in the absence of regulation. If US and EU law both prohibited massive-scale face recognition databases, I don't think Facebook and the like would be rushing to circumvent it. Are they really going to set up a server in Sealand or search for some elaborate loophole?

Finally, I just want to add that we won't be able to work out all the details within a single HN comment thread. Legislation in general is tricky and fraught with imperfections and tradeoffs. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, or that it wouldn't be effective. If I had just proposed the idea that freedom of speech could be protected by law, it would be easy to find problems with that. But at the end of the day, the first amendment and so on is valuable and effective... in spite of any imperfections. So on the same note, I feel that privacy legislation, even though it's kind of a new thing with some issues, could be made to work.

There are certainly issues - wouldn't society benefit if the device could also recognize people on the FBI's Most Wanted list?

And then the train of government/media abuse starts rolling: Persons-of-interest sought by local law enforcement? Registered sex offenders? People on the No-Fly list? Shouldn't these devices support wiretapping such that they can recognize people as directed by LEO on a rubberstamp warrant?