I thought this article on the ubiquity of cameras explored some good questions.
"Mr Gurrin wears a wide-angle camera around his neck which snaps several pictures of his field of view every minute, recording its location and orientation... for more than seven years... he has built up an archive of 12m images"
"Adding a run-of-the-mill digital camera to a phone, or pretty much anything else, costs about $10"
"Steve Ward of VIEVU, a Seattle firm that has been selling wearable cameras ... says the devices can help protect any professional who takes on legal liabilities: repairmen, estate agents, doctors..."
"More than a million cars in Russia now sport dashboard-cams that record the road ahead. This is mainly so that drivers can defend themselves against fraudulent insurance claims"
"patients with impaired memories should wear such devices...could alleviate some symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer's"
"The plan is to perch all the functions of a smartphone on the bridge of the user's nose...imagines apps that provide historical information to sightseers in foreign cities, or that help people identify plants and birds in their gardens. Telling people what they are seeing can make them more observant, more absorbed...Mr Gelernter has a deep dislike for the way it would interpose itself between the user and his world, including the other people in it...people surreptitiously using Glass as a teleprompter, perhaps to seem more knowledgeable, could put at "risk the very frankness and honesty of human communications"."
"...creepy. Take, for example, an idea on which Google applied for a patent in 2011: a camera that would keep track of which adverts and billboards its wearer noticed, and of any emotional responses they evoked..."
[Facial recognition] "Governments check whether faces are turning up on more than one driver's licence per jurisdiction; police forces identify people seen near a crime scene."
"Well aware of such concerns, Google has banned the use of face recognition in the apps that it makes available for Glass (dubbed Glassware)."
"But face recognition has its attractions, too. Bar staff and bouncers could be warned of trouble on the way (a British company already provides such a service); the ability to greet everyone cheerily by name might be welcomed in many service industries."
"What about a world in which, simply by living their lives, people create vast searchable records of all they have seen—a world, not of Big Brother, but of a billion Little Brothers? "
From The Economist, Nov '13
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21589863-it-getting-ever-easier-record-anything-or-everything-you-see-opens
No comments:
Post a Comment