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Augmented Reality and Privacy
An anonymous reader recommends a piece up at Augmented Planet that makes a couple of points about privacy in the realm of geotagging and augmented reality that haven't been discussed much. First, once you geotag and upload, say, a photo to the Net you can lose ownership over the data and especially its metadata. Second, data on the Net is long-lived and might be put together in ways you wouldn't like, long after it was created. "If you geotag a picture with your new 50" plasma TV in the background and upload it to the Web, congratulations you have just told everyone where you live and what you have of value. The web has a long memory — geotag something today and in six months it is still on the Web. When you tweet from the beach in Barbados telling your friends you are away for 2 weeks, that picture of your 50" plasma will still be out there along with its location. It's easy to track down someone's home address if you have their real name." The submitter adds, "I never really cared about my online privacy too much. This article made me think seriously about privacy for the first time. No mean feat."
2. keep all online family pictures private, behind a password
it always amazes me to find online profiles with birthdays and family member's photos: there's your mother's maiden name and your birthday on full display or a few clicks away, handy for opening new credit cards in your name
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hate to say it, but "Duh!"!
If I am uploading pictures or info, the one question that always goes through my mind, "Can anyone work out where I am and take advantage of it to do me harm, my family harm or steal anything from us?".
to always broadcast your location and everything about me to everyone on the internet? we are all friends, right? everyone on the internets cares about what i do everyday, right?
And we know what you did last summer...
I haven't used my real name anywhere on the Internet in about ten years.
Doh.
A search engine for burglars!
Quick, let's file a patent...
-- Let's go Viridian.
Maybe you should think seriously about the quality of your 'friends'. Unless you're one of those dupes who need to believe that the 600+ people that have sent you facebook friend requests acctually care about you.
Not everyone suffers from paranoia.
There is nothing wrong with uploading a bit of metadata about you here and there, the problem is when it becomes highly visible, which is the case with "augmented reality" systems (where the entire point is *seeing metadata*).
-- Let's go Viridian.
What on earth does this mean? "Lose ownership of the metadata inside a photo"? Does the author even know what he/she is talking about?
I don't exactly fear "losing the rights" to the metadata contained in the jpegs I spread around the web: shutter speed/focal length info, the camera source info, eventual embedded ICC profile, width/height info etc.
My god, the idiocy.
Nobody reads your twitter, nobody follows your flicker account and no 2bit criminal is going to do both when i can just drive round the block and see your curtains haven't changed states in the last 3 days. There are reasons to care about your privacy, future blackmail, employer searching for you, etc, but nobody reading you (mirco)blog is going to steal your TV.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Thieves are not *pirates*, you know.
(more seriously, thieves are quite happy to pay like everyone else when the profit/cost ratio is high enough.)
-- Let's go Viridian.
If you have a decent alarm system and insurance why would you even worry about advertising what you may or may not own? If you really believe this is a problem you better start burning your trash in the backyard behind a 10' fence. You never know when the google van will street-view your empty LCD boxes for all to see.
Come back when you have an OLED ! *g*
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Anybody who hasn't figured this out by now isn't going to. Computers have been around for over twenty years and the WWW a lot longer. I'm OK because the economic policies of the last three Presidents have left me with nothing to steal.
BOTH happened when I was at home and there was clear activity. One in the morning, busy getting ready and suddenly someone was in the kitchen who ran out.
Other time 3 people tried to climb on the balcony while 4 people were in the house.
The fast majority of crime in holland is committed by imigrants (don't bother telling me otherwise, all attempts were made by dark-skinned people) who have the combined IQ of a raisin.
/. nerds come up with all kinds of clever tricks to steal things, that is not how criminals do it. Brutality and a surety that the legal system has been gutted makes them attempt break ins where there is no point because they want cash now. Planning... that just doesn't feature. It is opportunity crime, when you are home, you got doors and windows unlocked, when you are away, you double bolt everything.
Mythbusters had a few of those Mission Impossible style break in attempts, meanwhile the biggest diamond heist that really happened, just involved driving up, loading the bags and driving away. No complex stuff, no sci-fi. Just the arrogance to think you can get away with it, and you often can. And when you don't, the law has so little change to catch you, it is worth the risk (conviction rate in Holland is less then 10% of REPORTED crimes, only a fraction of crimes are known to be reported, so do the math).
Do you really think a criminal who is going to sell your new plasma for at most a 100 dollars (think about it, even if you buy blackmarket, you want a box, you steal TV's from the warehous factory, not somebodies house) is going to bother keeping track of potential photo's that might show a plasma you had then and corrolate that with when you CLAIM to be away?
Real burglars just walk past and LOOK. And they are a hell of lot more interested in a place that is dark where they can get inside very quickly and away very quickly. And even then, what are they going to do with a 50inch plasma screen? Takes ages to unplug, get off the wall, into a car and then you got what? A 2nd hand tv. Oh yeah, fences pay big bucks for that.
I swear slashdot is the nerds fox news. You know those jokes:
amount of pedophiles in the entire world: -
amount of pedophiles on myspace according to Fox: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA broken up because of crap filter AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Slashdot is like that with privacy
Real world criminals tracking you: -
Criminals tracking you according to the privacy crazies on /.: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA broken up because of crap filter AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
It is like the crappy filter /. uses: Real spam stopped 0. Jokes and valid points ruined: zillion.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...to pick: if you geotag the picture of your 50'' plasma, nobody has to look up your home address by name.
just take a simple truncation of your real birthday
if your real birthday is sep 26, 1975, use sep 20, 1975. or if it is may 17, 1987, use may 10, 1987
the same goes for your name. unless absolutely necessary, never use your middle name. and if you have to use it, try to use only your middle initial. and if you can get away with it, use only your first name initial too. if you are fred willard, try to be f willard as much as possible. if you are jay leno, you are now j leno (heh, perhaps a bad example for alliterative reasons)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So to, is there nothing wrong with deciding that uploading a bit metadata may be used violate one's sense of privacy.
Paranoia's just a state, it's neither bad nor good. Acting on that paranoia to hurt ones self or others, that's bad. I see nothing harmful about not uploading these bits of information and therefore, paranoia or not, it's not a bad idea.
Now, I may not agree it's common sense as the GP does, but I don't think it's paranoia either.
Demented But Determined.
even if the cost to you is $0 financially, the cost to you is high in terms of hassle and headaches in dealing with bank bureaucracy over an extended period of time. you have to cut off the fake credit cards. additionally, now your real transactions are under the spotlight of greater scrutiny by the banks, which could result in denials or delays
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/learn_more/003484indiv.html
shame on you alabama, michigan, and missouri: the only states where this consumer initiated credit lock is not the law
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Forgive me if I missed something, since the GP's link won't open for me, but isn't this unrelated to Augmented Reality?
Augmented Reality refers to systems that are able to extract or generate metadata by interpreting a live image of one's surroundings, hence 'augmenting' that reality with additional information in the manner of a futuristic heads-up display.
Unless your phone, or whatever is doing the augmenting of your reality, is transmitting that data to a social networking service or somesuch, there is no actual disclosure going on: usually, the system is just reacting to glyphs or other visual elements within its field of view.
Next time I go on vacation I'll put it online complete with photos of a great new plasma TV. That is right after I wire it up to a 220 outlet so that when someone lays hands on it they are fried.
Or, more moderately, anything that appears to be a breach in security can also be one heck of a set up to trap bad guys. Although I will say that I live in an exceptionally safe environment. In my location thieves are almost always quickly caught and our local courts do tend to issue very long sentences.
Geotagging and Augmented Reality are not the same. Surely AR application can do geotagging, but not necessary, no more than it can produce sound for example. AR also can use publicly geotagged objects, with client not publicly geotagged. AR have no relation whatsoever to problem in question.
Don't post them on the internet.
"If you geotag a picture with your new 50" plasma TV in the background and upload it to the Web, congratulations you have just told everyone where you live and what you have of value. The web has a long memory -- geotag something today and in six months" nobody will care about your antiquated plasma TV.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I would lie saying that i have a big plasma tv, a lot of gadgets and money hidden in my house, and stay hidden till the buglar with that wonderful augmented reality device come to take it.
The real problem there is not so much augmented reality as is making public things that you dont want everyone know. Once you go that road, probably augmented reality and/or geotagged photos aren't necessary.
whoever opens a credit card in your name enjoys many more months of detection-free shopping on your dime, since you are out of the habit of monitoring your credit
credit cards are useful when used responsibly. its not valid to cede that entire space of your financial life because of criminals
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you buy a 50" Plasma and bring it home, anyone driving by while you take it inside now knows you own a 50" Plasma and where you live. Where does it stop?
While theoretically, it is possible to figure something like this out for a robbery or something like that, the chances are incredibly slim, and nothing you do with the exception of completely unplugging and never leaving you home is going to make you completely secure. This is just fear mongering, you are at no higher risk with internet than you are with normal conversation (you tell friend 1 you just got a tv, they tell their friend that a friend of theirs just got that new TV, later on you leave on a trip and tell your friend, whose friend happens to be around/friend 1 tells, and now he can go steal your TV.) It is the nature of socializing, you are gonna give information that is innocuous by itself but when pieced together information can be used for bad deeds.
Ok, go ahead and mod flaimbait or troll now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
People think of tweeting as a public broadcast, but for some totally irrational and unrealistic "reason", they don't think of unencrypted email as a public broadcast, so they're still happy to leak all sorts of private data which can be used against them. And while we all laugh at the Tweeter who does that, most people (i.e. the benchmark for defining "common" sense) don't laugh at the crypto-avoiders who effectively, if not deliberately, do the same thing. Common sense has a lot of catching up to do with real sense.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The answer to all of this is social networks. Whether it's posting pictures+blogs+"tweets" on Facebook that are only shared with your friends, or using Android's geolocation and only sharing it with your contact list.
What we really need is a social network that isn't closed up in a single company's app. I'd love to use my Facebook social network for sharing pictures and "private" blog entries about vacations. The problem is that it requires uploading all my data where it's locked up in Facebook.
Maybe in a few years we'll have an open cross-application social network. Anyone know of any platform like this out there now? Google Wave is the closest thing I can think of.
As long as you socialize online with the people who know you IRL.
In most cases it doesn't take a thesis in data mining to figure out your identity based on the chatter from your friends and colleagues.
As for OP's geotagging remark... better start strip searching your friends and family and forbidding any kind of photographing or video recording in your home (No geotagging in this house!).
Cameras and phones come with geotagging turned on by default, and now there are SD memory cards with built in wi-fi that automatically post your photos to Flickr or other sites of your choice.
And you thought it was a bother when someone you know tags you in a group photo in his/her Facebook album.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
...because no one in their right mind would travel 100's of miles to steal a 50" inch plasma tv that you can get for the price of a mediocre tv set just a few years ago anyway, there's more to it than that.
The thieves you'll most likely get (if any) is your locals. These have the time to check you out, to make sure you don't have guards - or security service...you can't find out that on facebook. And besides, they want much more from you than a mere plasma tv, if you have valuable silverware, artwork etc. now we're talking international thieves, thats something worth driving around after. The computer & your plasma & your playstation is only of interest to the local thieves.
There are also other key factors to if you get burglarized or not, for example - if you live in a tall building, on top...or besides a lot of neighbors - your average thief is NOT going to want to carry down 5-20 stairs past 10-20 neighbors your 50 inch huge weighty plasma tv, moving service 2'o clock in the night? Yeah right...
And for augmented reality, heh...if the burglars KNOW you have a LIVE WEBCAM - they'll be either using masks - or be sure to keep AWAY from your apartment - as there are plenty of other "non-surveillance" apartments around.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I don't have any nice things anyway.
it's overrated apparently.
"To stop the terrorists."
Sure, somebody might keep track of you on the internet for six months and steal your TV. Somebody could also drive by your house every so often and do the same thing. Is it worth it to censor your entire life to cower from burglers? Life is hard, take some risks and have some fun. Social networking is fun. You can buy a new TV, you can't buy back having wasted your life hiding.
It's funny that everyone talk about the internet and "information wants to be free", but in the end it basically breaks down all hierarchies--bring fairness to everyone and empowers everyone equally: and that includes criminals, the homeless, the predator, and the politician. I rather think of it as information wants to be discovered...and exploited.
I can't wait until F/OSS gets exploited by the internet--Granted F/OSS is benefitting the world more-so-ever, but so far it's a blind love fest.We all talk about freedom and the internet in the same words, and well.... you're going to get what you ask for.