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

[Guy Higgins < >]

+1 for Jonathan and Mr Lincoln.

In 1950, Cyril Kornbluth published a short story, The Little Black Bag, in which humanity existed in two distinct sub-groups.  One group was comprised of individuals who understood the world and the way it works and who thought about what that understanding implied and how to behave as thinking, deciding individuals in control of their own lives.  This group kept civilization running, as simply as possible, so that the second sub-group could wend their ways, pleasantly unthinking, through life — as my mother often said, "fat, dumb and happy."

I often wonder, in my cynical moments, if we’re not headed that way.  Doc, you observe that more investment is going into privacy — and that’s good.  At the same time, taking a single example, if I look at the photo of a group of college students under lockdown at a college because of a reported on-campus threat, every single person in the photo is on their smart phone and most of them are busily telling the world, via their favorite social media app, what’s going on and what they are doing — information that was being published in real time by the local newspaper (including the specific geo-locations of the social media users).  These kids were happily compromising their privacy and their safety — oblivious to the risk they were accepting.  Many young people today glory in being “tech savvy” whereas, in fact, they are simply adroit tech users without any understanding of the technology, its risks and implications.

I don’t know what that implies for the future — will these kids learn with experience, will someone educate them or will they simply continue obliviously; fat,dumb and happy, through life (Cyril Kornbluth’s future)?

Guy

From: "Jonathan H. King" < "> >
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 11:03:01 -0500
To: Doc Searls < "> >
Cc: Lucas Cioffi < "> >, ProjectVRM list < "> >
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] What will happen if/when Facebook opens up a facial recognition API?

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 < "> > 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 < "> > 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