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."

Comments

1. memorize a fake birthday

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:1. memorize a fake birthday

[dintlu]

This does not indemnify you against information uploaded by unwitting friends, relatives, acquaintances, or colleagues. The more people come to rely on the internet as a venue for socializing, the less control any individual will have over their personal information or their privacy. As information collecting becomes more automated, AR will become more useful and hence more commonplace, possibly bringing some of the issues raised by the article to the fore.

I think it's important to recognize that even though AR introduces additional risks to *your* security and privacy, it has the exact same effect on a *criminal's* security and privacy. I'll throw a hypothetical scenario out there - say you enabled a service at the supermarket that automatically emails you a copy of your receipt whenever you make a purchase. If your identity thief makes a purchase at one of these supermarkets, you have an incriminating email containing unrecognizable foodstuffs and a credit account you never opened, which can be used to spearhead an investigation pulling CCTV footage from that supermarket to compare to a facial recognition database, resulting in the identification and arrest of the identity thief.

Given this scenario, I think that rather than rebel against the erosion of our privacy, we need to accept that privacy in its current incarnation will never exist again, and instead work towards ensuring that no single group of people is allowed to exempt themselves or abuse this new information.

We're from the internet

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

And we know what you did last summer...

Avatar

[warren.oates]

I haven't used my real name anywhere on the Internet in about ten years.

New business opportunity

[Toy G]

A search engine for burglars!

Quick, let's file a patent...

Re:but it's cool and hip

[Toy G]

This obsession with self-visibility is a byproduct of "celebrity culture", which itself is a byproduct of XX-century broadcasting. Once current paradigms of information consumption give way to something different and more bidirectional, people will stop obsessing about exposing themselves.

Re:Nobody gives a shit about you

[Threni]

That might be one reason. Another is to give the police time to tell the family members so they don't find out about it from watching tv or reading a newspaper.

Re:easy way to generate a fake birthday:

[Eivind]

The insanity isn't there.

The insanity is in assuming that if a unknown person knows the name and birthday of a certain individual and his mother, then that is proof positive that he IS that person. By that logic, I am a dozen different people. It's just nonsense, pure and simple. Allowing a new line of credit to be opened on such skimpy information is grossly incompetent, and should result in the automatic assumption that the organization doing so is responsible for any and all losses resulting from their neglience.

If I want to open a new account here, I need either a digital signature (yes, one that uses two-factor authenthication to ensure I'm me), or I need to physically go to the post to pick up the card -- the post will then demand I present an actually valid ID before they give it to me. (a service they charge for, and call "verified recipient")