Through a Face Scanner Darkly(newyorker.com) |
Through a Face Scanner Darkly(newyorker.com) |
http://news.discovery.com/history/art-history/venice-masks-1...
In the 17th century, Brown said noblemen, patrician women, and other wealthy individuals began to wear masks and cloaks throughout the city. "This custom reached its apogee in the 18th century, as you can see in paintings by Pietro Longhi," Brown told Discovery News. She explained, "Masks and cloaks allowed one to move about the city anonymously, and thus offered considerable protection, as with the chador in the Islamic world. They also allowed women to frequent dubious places of recreation, such as gambling casinos, without compromising their respectability." She added, "It seems as if the upper class all wandered around in public space incognito in that period (the 18th century)."
How sad.
Like any conference for the past few years already?
Personally, I concluded that the claimed functionality such as you described must have been added for comic effect, particularly the line in the next paragraph about how someone's facial recognition technology could help me to know whether someone who is presumably right in front of me at the time is attractive or not...
As far as I can see, the path this kind of technology leads us down is only likely to end one of two ways:
1. We develop a more open and forgiving society that acknowledges everyone has faults and treats everyone fairly as the person they are today.
2. We create a society where every time you leave your home, or even in your own home, you constantly have to guard every little thing you say or do, including giving up all kinds of otherwise useful or enjoyable activities that might (justifiably or otherwise) reflect unfavourably on you in the future to someone whose opinion matters at the time.
Sadly, while there might be many people in the world who would both enjoy and respect the first option, it's not really an option at all right now, because there are also a lot of people in the world who will exploit personal information at the expense of the subject. Sometimes that is simply because they aren't very nice themselves. Sometimes it's for more indirect reasons like the way our societies have set up commercial incentives for businesses.
As long as everything from human nature to our economic systems are stacked against the transparency/fairness outcome, maybe it's best if we don't go too far down that path. This seems like a great example of the saying that just because we can do something, it doesn't mean we should.
That is a fashion change I could agree with!
Edit: Combine with LEDs for extra fun!
* http://www.refinery29.com/2014/01/60361/nametag
* http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/01/09/stalker-friendly-...
Personally, I think this is very scary, especially since they're planning to make it opt-out, so you're in the results, unless you sign up and opt-out. I'm guessing some legislation is necessary to prevent all out abuse of this sort of technology. There's obviously benefits to this sort of technology, but in my opinion, should be tightly controlled.
Or how about this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fac6aHFa_k
That seems like the sort of determination that ought to be made by the wearer...
In that case, I hope (1) is the outcome.
If there's a presumption of surveillance, and an effective means to compel production of any electronic records, the you end up with an effect similar to that which some people have noted concerning reviewing social networking pages as part of hiring practices (either public-facing content or by the reprehensible practice of requesting passwords).
As several people have noted: sure, if you want to go there, you'll discover that I'm a member of X, Y, and Z lawfully protected groups in terms of discrimination. In which case the onus is then put on the employer (preponderance of evidence) to show that a discriminatory hiring decision wasn't made, to say nothing of legal costs in defending against same.
I'm not entirely sanguine that this be the case -- there's a lot that can go wrong with legal procedure and protections. But laws do matter and can help.
Simply because something is technically possible doesn't mean it must happen.
Maybe it will come to active countermeasures. For example, you could set your browser (fingerprint and all) to trawl through an invented web history to poison tracking databases. Running such a program would both screw with the trackers and give you plausible deniability. Tag other people's selfies with your name on "social" sites, and tag your own with several names.
Sure they will. Laws help to protect us from all kinds of unwelcome behaviour despite there not being any direct physical intervention to prevent someone who is willing to accept the consequences from acting in that way. This is actually a particularly easy problem to solve.
For one thing, even if miniaturisation of the technology does make it hard to detect, someone still had to create it. That will require sophisticated and expensive manufacturing facilities for the foreseeable future.
Then in most cases it's going to be sold. That means money changing hands, and some form of advertising so vendors can be found by interested buyers.
Arguably the big new risk to privacy from modern technologies is the scale they can reach, uploading, correlating and redistributing vast quantities of data. That means someone has to store the database and provide access to it and probably charge money for that access.
Any of these aspects can be identified, challenged or restricted in law as a preventive mechanism. Moreover, doing so will typically be much easier than identifying someone walking down the street with covert surveillance equipment, which frankly is already widely available without trying very hard to find it, it's just not widely used.
The idea that mass surveillance and the demise of privacy are inevitable conflicts with reality. These things don't happen in isolation, and the people doing them have motivations for their behaviour, and you fight socially unacceptable behaviour that happens to invade privacy the same way you fight any other kind.
So it's not a matter of choosing between those two futures. "They" have already got their database about you. Do you want the same tools, or not?
Problem with any new privacy laws is that they will only restrict us, not the government. Since the government is the only one with the legal authority to torture and imprison and rob us, I don't much see the point.
But regardless of that, privacy is a right onto itself, it shouldn't need justification. It's violations of thereof that should need to be justified.
There is a lot more that can hurt quality of life than something as obvious and severe as imprisoning someone. And if your government has the legal authority to torture you, you need a new government.
Failing to control sensitive personal information, and for that matter the inevitable mistaken information that will go along with it, could harm innocent people for reasons including but certainly not limited to: their religious views, their political inclination, their stance on controversial subjects such as abortion or legalisation of drug use, their employment history, any previous criminal activity no matter how minor and how long ago, and the lies a bitter ex once told about them in an online forum.
The kinds of harm caused might include but again are certainly not limited to: inability to get various kinds of insurance or paying excessive premiums, inability to get a job or to negotiate a fair employment contract and compensation when they do, inability to get credit, inability to travel by certain modes of transport, inability to attend certain public events, inability to send their kids to a good school, inability to meet the special someone they would have had those kids with, and in too many real world examples already, harassment, assault, injury, or death.
Governments should be restricted in the personal information they collect and how they can use it, not least because "government" is a sweeping term that probably includes a substantial proportion of the entire adult population in any first world country. But in some respects, preventing the unjustified collection, processing and disclosure of personal information in the private sector is far more important, because that's where most of the risks of nasty but not life-destroying, hire-a-lawyer-and-sue-for-millions damage will occur.
But it's more important to have one's privacy protected from those who, as I said, have the legal authority to torture, imprison, and rob.
Problem here being that any legislation, in current climate, will only restrict private spying and not government spying.
>And if your government has the legal authority to torture you, you need a new government.
Agreed!