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Privacy in the world of [Google Glass] and wearable computing . . . and wifi, apparently
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Doesn't that shift the expectation though?
When I'm at home (since I live in the suburbs) and my phone connects to an unknown WiFi connection, I'm going to assume that it's an unsecured personal WiFi, because I have no expectation of public WiFi.
...
Is this where people are talking across from each other? The different expectations in different public settings, even though they might all be "public". (e.g. Suburb sidewalk vs. City Center sidewalk)
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@MortNZ
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How would this relate to Glass? Whether you are in the suburbs or city, you still assume only those around you can see you, right?
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
I'm not sure how this related to Glass actually :P
I followed the WiFi tangent and got lost.
Edit: Actually let's make this post more substantial.
I never said being photographed in public is fine (hopefully that came across in my previous posts)
I just believe that adding Glass to what we already have isn't going to be that big of a difference.
We really need to work on the laws and social norms surrounding these issues, since these things are already happening, just not in large enough numbers to cause a fuss.
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I think this is an interesting idea, and it would promote a society where permission is asked before things are posted. The downside is that someone may be caught up in the background of any picture of video, so the result could be a sharp curtailment in the ability to share.
Admittedly, the balance is not easy here. We don't want to unnecessarily restrict people, but at the same time, we don't want the threat of constant surveillance to restrict people from acting freely either. As with most things, I think the answer needs to be compromise, and I think that the reason Glass is raising so many hackles is that it forces is to move away from the current "default" of allowing recording without breaking anonymity.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
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Google's network of information could actually offer a decent alternative. Why not let people designate a contact email address, and then whenever a video is posted that google ids you in, it blurs your face abd sends you an email asking for your consent to unblur it?
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
That's extremely reasonable. Even just the email notification is a good start.
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No, I'm just going to back slowly away. Away from the crazy. Carry on.
ie - I have no actually argument as to why it's not
The same goes for my home. My home doesn't suddenly become public just because I don't lock my door or leave a window (or even a door) open. It's a private residence and there is no state I may leave it in that makes it a public location whatsoever.
That said, I do not agree that auto-connect itself is immoral. Connecting to someone else's private wifi is immoral and the former lends itself to the latter, but the technology itself isn't to blame. There is value in auto-connect. In New York there are tons of public networks with no gateway. Hopefully we will have a widespread nationwide wifi infrastructure at some point in the future and unless devices can differentiate between public and private without a private resident or business owner securing their network, this is just going to be an unfortunate reality.
I am amazed at how blase` some people are being in here about the potential repercussions of something like Google Glass. I don't think Google Glass specifically will doom our civilization, but the improved and expanded (more discreet) models Google and other companies will release in the future will be more problematic. Do you really think people will turn a new leaf and decide to disregard embarrassing pictures or videos of you just because 'everyone' is google glassin' it? No. People are dicks. HR needs a way to sift through mountains of resumes, TMZ needs as many ways as possible to gawk at celebrities, and teens have this unbearable need to be cruel to each other. Yeah, maybe we will get over it, eventually. Probably! In the meanwhile? I guess we just tell all those people who are negatively affected to suck it and shut it because they are getting in the way of technological progress? "Bro, just rise up above your antiquated feelings of shame, you're really delaying my cybernetic utopia". We have communities dedicated to gossiping about people who have been dead for decades (sometimes hundreds or years). People are dicks, I think it is inherent to human nature. Oh and if Google Glass ever gets small enough to fit like a contact lens, expect the burdens to disproportionaly affect women (you can guess why).
I think people have offered some good suggestions though. Like having locations set things up so Glass would automatically set to stop recording or taking pictures when the wearer enters. Having people receive emails to unblur their faces. Placing special protections for minors.
The aspect of digital immersion at expense of social interaction and quiet solitude should be discussed more, I think. I'm joined at the hip to my iPhone, it is a little depressing.
Except that wifi network is not private, it's more or less the same as if you had a film projected onto the side of your house and then got upset when people stopped to watch it without paying you - it's just a different wavelength. You can't demand payment for radiation being projected into a public space, unless you've taken steps to make it not-public (put on a password, or erected a fence so you can't see the film from the road).
But also,
I'm not "demanding" anything, much less payment. We are discussing morals. Given that people pay for a subscription to wifi in their private residence, it is immoral, in my opinion, to siphon bandwidth from or piggyback onto said networks.
Also, it's important to remember that there are people who surf unprotected wifi networks and there are people who chronically siphon from someone else (a neighbor, a business, etc.).
There's also a big difference between actively projecting a movie in a publicly-viewable place and just being stuck with the physics of wireless connectivity. Securing your network is preventative and certainly a good idea, but its not a consumer's responsibility to ensure he/she isn't being stolen from. It's the responsibility of others not to do that.
Besides, even if you're just sticking your antenna into every wifi network that so much as winks at you, remember that every network has a name and are, in fact, distinct from each other. Putting aside the physics of wireless connectivity, it's clearly something someone else owns/is responsible for. It's silly to argue that it isn't private. They might not own the radiation but they own the network and the gateway (router) that provides access to that radiation and since you're either accessing or circumventing that gateway, you are accessing something that you have no right accessing.
I have no problem as it stands with Google Glass but the idea that unsecured wifi networks are somehow not private is ridiculous. The level of security on a network has diddly squat to do with whether or not it is a private network.
Access to an unencrypted wifi network is restricted to authorized users(only certain classes people can use it). This restricted access could be called private, I think that's confusing in a debate about privacy.
Content transmitted over an unsecured wifi network is public(anyone can legally read it).
Content transmitted of an encrypted network is private and even where possible it is unlawful for an unauthorized person to decrypt it.
Click here for a horrible H/A thread with details.
Also, it completely clashes with most of my outfits.
There's going to be some privacy issues with this thing almost immediately. I'm a huge tech nerd and even I don't like the idea of this always on camera HUD that gives no clues as to the wearers intent. Something simple, like a bright red LED to let others know its recording would go a long way to assuaging the paranoia of this thing.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
I agree, this seems like a very reasonable solution. Now for Devil's Advocate.
Should Google be responsible for notifying Paramount or Disney every time something they identify as their property is posted / published, and receive a waiver before allowing it's public release? Cause...we know where that's going to go.
I think Google has a fine line to walk with a solution like that, because the idea of requiring prior consent creates a pretty distinct precedent.
I'm also concerned about how blurry the lines are getting between obtaining pictures / video and publishing them. It seems like the paradigm we are working from is that everything on Google Glass is published directly to the web, indexed, and in some cases used for commercial use (driving hits to pages w/ ads). Nothing exactly specific to Google Glass, but as these record and publish technologies become even more ubiquitous, and indexing technology becomes better, we're going to start running into some friction.
For example, what about a video where commerical music is playing? Where a TV is on in the background? Where you have video of Mickey Mouse or a Coca Cola logo?
Yes you can walk into your neighbors house because they never lock their doors and take their tv, but you can still go to jail for it.
Google can err on the side of consumers and simply blur the coke logo or the TV set showing Aladdin on it in the background. And so long as the background audio isn't the centerpiece of the video (like a TV playing a disney movie in the far background while someone is talking is one thing, but a video with actual BG music pulled from the lion king soundtrack is another) then the audio can just slide.
If they can automate the process reality shows use for blurring logos on T-shirts and televisions, that would go a long way towards actually easing the kinds of videos people can post on youtube.
And in those cases where the branding or the audio is central to the video itself, yeah, it would take approval from the content owner to show the video. And I am mostly okay with that, though I can see some edge cases where it would be bad, like someone does a video dealing with a terrible design flaw in a new Nike shoe and letting people know not to buy it, and Nike pulls the content because it uses their branding.
This is going off on a tangent...
But if you can do that, you can easily replace what's playing on the TV with something else... So the TV in the background running a Pepsi commercial? Change it to a Coke commercial. That Adidas shoe? Change it to a Nike.
It's not like the technology is that far off.
As for Nike pulling the ad...satire / criticism are technically fair use, but it would be interesting to see how Google deals with it...considering how YouTube deals with claims of copyright infringement, I wouldn't be surprised if they just let it fly.
An interesting thing though is that this could potentially make billing for rights a lot more straightforward. Every time someone watches a YouTube video of someone playing a Beatles song on their keyboard? $.01 deducted from their Play account and goes to Paul McCartney. Or that video with the Lion King in the background? Disney gets a fraction of a cent each time someone watches that video, or some portion of revenue from that channel.
I think there's two separate stages here - connecting to the network and then what you use it for. Kind of how the postman trespasses onto my property when he delivers letters, or at least walks onto my property without my permission, is a different thing than someone walking in and raiding the fridge.
Also people should the the "Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi if they're after a scifi story exploring these sort of issues.
I am trying to balance the possible with the necessary which is kind of tricky with disruptive technology. Just trust me in that changing background audio while people are talking is a feat bordering on ridiculously difficult / impossible for trained human audio engineers. Having an automated script do it is right out.
The forensic crime dramas on television wouldn't lie to me about this!
It's still interesting to me that it's glass that is causing this paradigm shift for some people. Smartphones did it for me. I already assume all strangers might be recording me. I'm not as paranoid as that may sound, but I do tend to assume in public that everything I'm doing *could* be held against me later, especially if I'm around unknown people. Not due to nefarious people being everywhere, but just the simple shit that keeps being brought up, the accidental accomplice. Someone recording something for harmless reasons that happens to include something incriminating. I only tend to treat anything as private if I'm inside a private structure with a limited defined audience. I'm not saying any of this is good, but it's there. Glass only justifies the accidental accomplice theory due to there being a higher capacity for more passive recorders instead of active recorders if it becomes a market penetrating product along the same lines of a cell phone.
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Yes, it's ridiculously tricky / difficult to take apart mixed audio with the tools that we've got right now. It's pretty much difficult to the point of being impossible in a lot of cases. I'm not a sound engineer or expert on mixing / signal processing, so please excuse my ignorance here...
In this case though, we aren't just separating random mixed audio - we are separating out a (mostly) known signal - the original song or other audio. Is the difficulty level the same if you are removing one track from mixed audio when you still have the original track? It seems that could potentially be an almost trivial task.
Since the say...Lion King song is known, the degree of difficulty would seemingly go down. Not to easy, with today's tools, especially if it's background and poorly recorded (or sped up / slowed down / filtered / etc), but definitely to something that's in the realm of possible. Maybe not today, but ten or twenty years down the line?
I personally see it more likely that Google automatically recognizes the materials and automatically credits the appropriate copyright holders (or blurs) and much technically easier, but if someone saw a potentially large enough value in removing that background noise, it seems like the kind of problem that just needs some time and resources.
Christ, after reading this my mind just went to the worst places with the apps I know for a goddamn fact will be made by some jackass when/if these things hit mainstream.
Like, think "boob recognition software".
He lives on as cheezburger grease in our hearts.
totally different. The sound of a car driving by, the soundtrack on the radio, and the three people talking all are falling into the same ranges of discernible audio frequency. The acoustics of the location change the way the audio sounds. Is the room creating an echo? Are the car stereo speakers blown and therefore the sound is tinny and off?
To take the audio out would not only require a ton of meticulous hand-done work, but you absolutely will lose lots of the other sound in the process, to the point where you won;t understand what people are saying. Fuck, even taking constant static out of a bad recording taking a lot of tonality out of a persons voice, leaving them sounding pitched and robotic.
Just trust me (and nexus) on this one, we both have to deal with this kind of shit in our work. It's not feasible or practical.
Except that the postman doesn't trespass - he has permission to enter your property for the purpose of delivering your mail (it's part of that whole "social contract" thing.)
I think that it's telling that one side can produce a consistent model, and the other has not been able to.
Add that to the fact that its simply an advertising tool and its benefits seem shallow. Not to mention, as has been stated, that privacy in this country is pretty much dead if this thing takes off.
To my mind any sort of encryption or authentication is the basis of the "walls" of wireless networks, since by definition wireless networks impinge on the property of others. If you're running run, then it's not just inside your house, it's also inside my house, using up spectrum in my "air-space" so to speak and interfering with my wireless devices. So we're clearly into shared property territory in that regard anyway. If you set your devices to the same SSIDs as mine, then our devices are in fact going to conflict with each other in a serious way.
Unsecured wi-fi where the network and it's internet access are considered private seems like an unfeasible, oppressive legal construct. I see no practical alternative then simply saying "unsecured wi-fi is public wi-fi", but dealing with the mis-use of private information which might be obtained from it as we normally would.
So if my fence is left open, my back yard is now public property?
Is your backyard still delineated by fencing? Or indeed signposts of some sort properly indicating it's boundaries?
The comparable analogy would be a wi-fi capture page of literally any sort saying "private". It's a stupid security measure, but you've taken some type of steps to indicate to potential trespassers that they are doing this, and are in fact on private property of some sort.
EDIT: And again - a wi-fi network is not "on your property". It's in my air too.
This is the video in case you haven't seen it.
This is the future Google is trying to paint. Does it seems like a good thing? It seems like a future populated by insufferable nitwits. I love how the guy was way more enamored with his HUD than actually talking with the friend he was supposed to have lunch with.