Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Gadget Keeps Record of Your Life
An anonymous reader writes "SenseCam, touted as a visual diary of sorts by Microsoft Corp., is designed to be worn around the neck and take up to 2,000 images a 12-hour day automatically. The prototype responds to changes such as bright lights and sudden movements and might one day even respond to other stimuli such as heart rate or skin temperature -- to track medical problems as easily as to record a Hawaiian vacation."
From The Artical:
"Perhaps weeks or months later, she might have zipped through them to figure out when she last saw a particular colleague or what bottle of wine she had been drinking that night."
Two THOUSAND pictures a day? ZIP through them?
This thing looks larger than my Cybershot-U (which much better pictures than what I saw on Microsoft's site from it), and seems like it would require a _lot_ of work to constantly maintain and keep organized the hundreds to thousands of photos taken everyday. Let alone time to download them on a regular basis... There are defiently some cool things on that Microsoft page though, this just isn't one of them =P
While I can see the interest in a gadget like SenseCam, how many of you believe that it will be turned into spyware by a large number of people almost immediately?
We've already seen some of the negative effects of putting cameras into cell phones: Guys snipping pictures up skirts in bars, etc.. You also hear about pictures being taken by witnesses of license plates on cars used in crimes, but not as often. These events don't occur very often because people still have to actually take the picture, and that takes time and coordination, and also because cell phone cameras suck so bad.
But let's give people a very, very easy way to take pictures of whatever is in front of them. What happens? People go looking for interesting things to stand in front of. Other people are interesting, especially when they're doing something out of the ordinary. Or something wrong.
Because the SenseCam people don't have a BatPhone, they don't know where the interesting people are minute-to-minute. They take their cameras and just start hanging around places. The cameras take lots of pictures. Later, the pictures get reviewed. Many get deleted, some are saved, some are posted to the Internet as some kind of video blog.
Slashdot readers can take it from there.
This is a great thing for personal security. If you get mugged or robbed, rape or such you have a picture of your attacker. I can see this being marketed this way
I can see this as easily being banned in buildings with sensitive material, like military schools, and certainly business meatings and production floors.
I only really see this being useful for teenagers and people whose companies don't depend on secrecy at their level.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I know this is a MS product with potential privacy concerns, and therefore likely to get slammed into the ground around here, but it raises some interesting notions that keep gnawing at me when I see tourists literally just walking around Times Square with a video camera.
What is the inherent value in recording your life in such minute detail? Isn't that what our memory is supposed to be for? What happens to your life when it becomes about recording your life? Is that a meta-life? What about recording yourself watching earlier recorded activities? Is it possible to become consumed with recording your life that you stop living it?
until they take this thing and use it to photograph the rape for their sick, twisited pleasure. I don't think that this is a good marketing scheme for these.
/me/ buy one. Of course, I do have a tendency to over estimate the sanity of the average tech consumer (which is sad, because they must be buying, in droves, all kinds of stupid shit or companies would not continue to make them).
In fact, I don't think there is any way to market these things that'd make
you don't THINK you have anything to hide...
now I am not paranoid by any means, but to think that everything about you can be public information without any dangers is utter folly!
for one: SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER
what about credit card numbers, bank statements, taxes, ANYTHING
plus just because you "don't have anything to hide" doesn't affect the right to privacy that we as americans enjoy...even if someone is a criminal, the potential Big Brother risks STILL violate his civil rights...
i don't have anything to hide, but i still don't want to be followed
i believe in my rights as guaranteed by the US Constitution
however, if you CHOOSE to allow yourself to be tracked...well, i have no quarrel with that
if it was forced, however...
I'm sure lots of minimum wage hour employers would welcome this..
Welcome Wally World Employees..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Reminds me of Snow Crash, whereas ubergeeks wore equipmemnt that recorded EVERYTHING, w/ the hopes that someone would want to buy a peice of their data.
Awesome!
You think you're being funny. I think so, too. But never underestimate the true allure of voyeurism -- and I'm not talking porno. People like to look into other people's lives. Photographs are one the most intimate ways to do that (and for this reason, I found that awkward movie kind of chilling).
I keep all my photos online (I've got about 3200). I only take maybe 100-200 a month and am really bad about posting them.
There are people -- friends I haven't seen in forever, ex-coworkers, and even people who only know me from friggin' slashdot -- who only ever communicate with me to ask when I'm updating the site. People love it. And I lead a pretty boring life! Can you imagine if somebody interesting (like, say, a cop, a rock singer, Linus Torvalds) started posting a massive visual blog of their entire day?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Yeah, like nobody ever made money from selling tech to teenage Japanese girls. Who do you think bought all those camera phones and sent all those DOCOMO messages?
I don't think there would be a problem finding a market for this. Also if you look at the pictures it would be pretty easy to hide. Looks to me like it would fit in a breast pocket fairly easily.
So I would expect there would be objections to folk taking them into movie theatres and such.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
We bug ourselves.
> This is like one of those electronic probation tether things for crooks
Not just for crooks.
Imagine having to wear one of these things as a condition of probation.
Or as a condition of employment.
Imagine having to wear it 24x7 to prove that you're not doing anything "bad," as in "bad in the eyes of someone who holds power over you."
Imagine being accused of being "bad" because you _won't_ wear such a device 24x7.
And you were worried about having to pee in a cup.
Would you therefore not end up spending your entire life reviewing those previous events in your life? To the point where you end up reviewing yourself reviewing previous events?
On the other hand, if you record all the events in your life for future generations, wouldn't those future generations care nothing about 99.99% of what you did?
Sure, I'd love to see a visual record of the battles of Alexander the Great but I'm not sure I'd give a damn about what time his daily bowel movements were or whether he liked his meat rare or well-done.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.