Life Recorder
In 2006, writing about future threats on privacy, I described a life recorder:
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.
I can’t find a quote right now, but in talks I would say that this kind of technology would first be used by groups of people with diminished rights: children, soldiers, prisoners, and the non-lucid elderly.
It’s been proposed:
With GPS capabilities built into phones that can be made ever smaller, and the ability for these phones to transmit both sound and audio, isn’t it time to think about a wearable device that could be used to call for help and accurately report what was happening?
[…]
The device could contain cameras and microphones that activate if the device was triggered to create evidence that could locate an attacker and cause them to flee, an alarm sound that could help locate the victim and also help scare off an attacker, and a set of sensors that could detect everything from sudden deceleration to an irregular heartbeat or compromised breathing.
Just one sentence on the security and privacy issues:
Indeed, privacy concerns need to be addressed so that stalkers and predators couldn’t compromise the device.
Indeed.
Oz Ozzie • April 19, 2010 6:47 AM
I was going to write a sci-fi story about this. I fear I’m going to have to get a move on before it’s too late…
This sort of thing requires every to buy in. Since that won’t happen in this society, it’ll grow behind closed-gate opt-in communities, but they’ll have rather different social mores to the one we live in now.