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Comment by lovamova | Hacker News Reader

Turning people into walking video surveillance systems since 2013. I'll try to avoid people wearing these glasses.

My experience for the last two years is that usually there are 2 or 3 people sitting around in any public place with their phones/tablets out pointed in my direction. Those phones/tablets have a camera (most have two at this point). They can be turned on remotely by software running in a background process. In addition almost all public spaces have more than one surveillance camera.

I don't think merely avoiding google glass wearing people will help much. To be effective you should probably avoid anyone with a phone/tablet that is not in their pocket and stay out of public spaces (maybe live in the woods).

Why not complain about Gorgon Stare instead? Since it is more likely to be used for infringing rights and you have more of a legal case (preventing unwanted photography in public was lost long ago).

>"The system is capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city, which can then be analyzed by humans or an artificial intelligence, such as the Mind's Eye project being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. [..] It is a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone." -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

You know, in public places there are going to be lots of eyeballs recording images directly into human brains. Most of these people will quickly forget about you if you don't do anything unusual, of course, but there's always a chance that there's someone around who recognizes you. I'd say it's always best not to assume you have privacy in any public place.

There's a very, very large difference between eyeballs on a person and wide-scale archived surveillance. The Supreme Court ruling against warrantless GPS trackers on cars (whereas warrantless 24-hour surveillance is okay) is an outstanding example, and that one ignores the fact that human memory is pretty crappy when it comes to evidence.

That being said, I think widespread cameras are simply something people are an inevitability that people are going to have to get used to, warts and all.

Quite true, but I believe what we were discussing was individual's recordings of what they were seeing, rather than systematic surveillance.

My point is more that pervasive, individual, recorded surveillance is a different beast than random acquaintances seeing you around town.

It's really the scale of the thing -- YouTube and Ustream and the like are going to have some serious privacy concerns when masses of people want to start lifestreaming.

Wait, do you think that everybody is going to be uploading everything they see to YouTube? Different people have different comfort levels about what they put online which means that being tagged in Facebook photos can often be embarrassing, but very few people have zero desire for privacy and I don't see share-by-default taking off for lifeloggers.

I see it becoming vastly more prevalent. Maybe not when Glass comes out (particularly due to data caps,) but I imagine that surveillance/sousveillance will be notably less taboo in 10 years.

Of course, I should disclose that I became greatly interested in (at least partially edited) lifeblogging once I saw devices like the vaporwared Zion Eyez[1] or the Memoto[2].

I attempted to start recording my drives home with my phone and publishing them on YouTube, but I'm not committed enough to keep it up until it becomes frictionless. This would be a perfect example of the potentially scary surveillance -- if a number of people start autopublishing dash cam recordings, it creates a way for people/organizations/governments to data mine someone else's data for their own surveillance purposes.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zioneyez/eyeztm-by-zione...

[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/martinkallstrom/memoto-l...

And when similar capabilities are built into less obvious glasses? What about contacts? At what point will you have decided that since everyone is on camera at all times in public, from someone's camera, it just doesn't matter?

We're all going to have to get used to being sousveilled.

They could prove useful against cops abusing the law. Cops are going to use this sort of tech very soon anyway. Might as well fight back with your own.

The word for that is souveillance, surveillance from below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

You'd hope they follow the convention of having an LED on while recording.

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