Thursday, March 16, 2006

On "vanishing privacy"

How about you? Would you wear a "life-recorder" if there would be studies that it reduces risk of whatever future violent crime? I guess for some the answer will depend on how the data is handled - for purely local data there is not much risk of your privacy violation, but, at the same time, your personal risks will not be mitigated as effectively (if a device is destroyed during the crime).

I suspect, given massive storage requirements, its a task for Google :-) And if they deploy world-wide WiFi (which I still doubt..), they can use it to stream video from "life-recorders" to a central location... ah, the life in 2025 :-)

Bruce Schneier: Your vanishing privacy: "The typical person uses 500 cell phone minutes a month; that translates to 5 gigabytes a year to save it all. My iPod can store 12 times that data. A 'life recorder' you can wear on your lapel that constantly records is still a few generations off: 200 gigabytes/year for audio and 700 gigabytes/year for video. It'll be sold as a security device, so that no one can attack you without being recorded. When that happens, will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good, just as prosecutors today use the fact that someone left his cell phone at home as evidence that he didn't want to be tracked?"

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Dr Anton Chuvakin