Re: [projectvrm] What will happen if/when Facebook opens up a facial recognition API?

[Devon M T Loffreto < >]

Im in Boston at PAXEast leading a panel on kids learning to code and make via games: http://kidoyo.com/paxeast2014.php

My message to developers here: 

"Make things so that kids can make things with the things you make... make the future of education a dev project!"

We are getting into vrm waters when we see the market as both a consumer and producer event taking place in the life of Individuals. Doc wrote a piece on "First Person Technologies" recently, and about a week later Oculus Rift was bought by Facebook prompting this "Persson First Technology" response: https://twitter.com/notch/status/448586381565390848 by Markus Persson, developer behind Minecraft.

Developers are no longer abstractions of Society... relegated to dark basements, segmented away from the core of companies and living isolated creative experiences. Increasingly, they are leading social dev experiences.

Facebook is one "short/disable/profit" stock/service manipulation experience away from extinction... we need more developers to be aware of the social consequences of building data models that deny personal integrity to people first. Sovereign by design services will come to be when people make them necessary... and that is both a personal effort and a social ridicule experience in a culture lacking access to meaningful education on the matter.

Facebook, admittedly, is the byproduct of an immature mind... but the underlying data model is not the fault of Facebook...that is the fault of each of us in modern Society. We may not choose to be slaves, but we are choosing to be data slaves by design... and as for not being masters of others, I agree... but we must be the masters of ourselves. Abe's wisdom was temporal...not absolute.

That is a structural concern not active in Society democratically today. Thats the problem... don't ask for Rights, engineer them.

Devon

On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Jonathan King < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.  ~ Abraham Lincoln

On Apr 8, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I think the tide is turning on this stuff, as more people become aware of the Faustian natures of the bargains they're making with the Facebooks of the world. Less investment is going into unwelcome surveillance and more into privacy protection and related work. Or so it seems to me at 11:51 on a Tuesday night.

But I should put my bias on the table. To me — and I hope to others involved in ProjectVRM — our work is toward giving the individual more agency in the world, including more control over their own exposures. That goes for the CEOs you'd like to spy on in your scenario, as well as everybody else.

Doc

On Apr 8, 2014, at 11:39 PM, Lucas Cioffi < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Hi All, this one's for the futurists out there...

These days, if the average person's geographic location is made public, that person usually is the one who made it public using a service like Foursquare.

In the future, do we expect that to not be the case?  If Facebook opened up a facial recognition API, would we expect that most public, geographic check-ins would instead be made by third-party apps & hardware without consent of the one who gets checked-in?  

For example, I'm guessing many people would jump at the chance to get free car insurance in exchange for mounting a facial recognition scanner to the roof of their car.  The driver gets free insurance, and while driving to pick up groceries, he uploads a few hundred people's locations to some company's cloud.

I could see a bunch of new applications for data like this.  For example, if my company is competing with another company, then I could pay $100 to use a search engine which could tell me all the buildings that the competing CEO has walked into over the past 2 years and which new clients he/she has been meeting with this week.

These questions come to mind: 

How is this good/bad?  Is this inevitable?  Does this change human behavior in significant ways?

--

Lucas Cioffi

Co-Founder, BarkBest.com

Charlottesville, VA

917-528-1831