5 ms·

Widespread sousveillance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance) is the path to the right kind of future!

pekk 13y ago
I don't want my snoopy neighbors to be photographing me at every time of the day. I am not doing anything to deserve that level of suspicion. Not even criminals deserve this level of surveillance, it is abhorrent nonsense out of 1984. And we accept it just because we change the 'sur' to 'sous' on the grounds that the government is not allowed to do it? Believe me, if constant personal surveillance in every moment and place becomes generally socially acceptable, there will be nothing to stop 'surveillance'.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  There won't even need to be any surveillance; the gov't can just review the sousveillance footage.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    Sure, but we'll see 'em when they do, and then we'll see 'em again when they try to act on the info they've gathered, etc. We'll vote them out of office if they abuse their knowledge, because we'll know they've abused it.
    - wtbob 13y ago
      I think my sarcasmeter just pegged.
      - diminoten 13y ago
        I choose to believe the US system of checks and balances isn't broken.
        krichman 13y ago
        It may not be broken but it definitely has been co-opted.
  - e3pi 13y ago
    >There won't even need to be any surveillance; the gov't can just review the sousveillance footage. “If the NSA is big brother, Glassholes are the new little brother.” `Godwin's Law' Reductio ad Hitlerum: "Our NSA-Youth Corps wears Glass, shouldn't you?"(tm)
  - JabavuAdams 13y ago
    Will "the government" exist in 100 years?
- diminoten 13y ago
  Can you elaborate on "abhorrent nonsense out of 1984" with a rational argument?
- XorNot 13y ago
  Cheap easily accessible recording devices have powered most civil interest in abuses of police power, the identification and capture of domestic terrorists and a few full out popular revolutions against corrupt government regimes. The constant refrain of "oh it's 1984" is completely at odds to the empowerment of the public that readily available and pervasive recording devices have given us - the cellphone camera has done more to prevent tyranny then that book ever will.
- darkmighty 13y ago
  You're already watched in the vast majority of public spaces you go to. However, you don't have direct access to this kind of footage for personal defense -- which just increases the susceptibility of our surveyors to corruption, abuse or simply omission. Moreover, I don't think your neighbors would be particularly interested in recording your life; what they see is already stored in their minds. Now in exceptional cases they _would_ be interested, such as spotting someone break into your house -- and also on their own defense, of course -- for example if you offended them. In any case, the case for the right of personal sousveillance is vastly stronger than against, as I see it.
  - krichman 13y ago
    I think we should have the right to prevent Facebook-like companies from aggregating our friends' data about ourselves, that's the only problem I have with Glass. Ideally we'd be able to force a company to delete any recognisable image of ourselves that we haven't signed a release for. Especially when your friends and neighbours are going to screw up privacy settings (by Facebook's design) and share it with at least everyone they know.
    - hobs 13y ago
      Even though I will never be able to get this, I want this so much. People I know constantly over share and refuse to listen about how the information is being used, and I know I make it into their streams.
- JabavuAdams 13y ago
  You don't, but your grandkids probably won't care. Eventually you're going to elect priests and public officials (i.e. establishment authority figures) even though there are videos of them having sex and/or taking a shit. Because no one will care anymore. I don't think I'm ready for that future, but there will be benefits as well as the obvious negatives.
jka 13y ago
I've been pondering this for some time - sousveillance is arguably better than surveillance, in that it potentially allows people to shine a light on many more troubling situations - and keep evidence - and to some extent it reduces the 'surveillance disparity' between police/law enforcement and everyday citizens. That said, there are a lot of caveats with the road we're on just now. One of these is that Google is driving this forward as a single player, and - have no doubt - that's where they want to be. If we place all of our sousveillance content with one organization, then we place a lot of trust in that organization to keep it safe, not censor it against our wishes, and so forth. I trust Google a lot more than many, many other companies, but ultimately it is still possible for it to be strong-armed and pressured into doing things behind the scenes which may or may not be to everyone's benefit - or more typically, are to a specific cause's benefit, or for pure business reasons. For a truly open, transparent future we'd need some kind of distributed, reliable shared fabric into which sousveillance content could be stored - and also potentially analyzed if we want to make use of the additional benefits of image/video/audio recognition, tagging etc. And that's when the challenges of bandwidth, latency, availability of technical expertise, infrastructure cost, etc all come into play, so I think at least in the near term we are still looking at placing our trust in one of a few providers. PS: Also I'd add that sousveillance isn't a magical fix-all; if you have a recording of someone taking a swing at you with a weapon, that isn't evidence that you weren't spending the previous few hours tormenting them - there will be situations of selective editing and misrepresentation, just as there are in other forms of media.

pekk 13y ago

I don't want my snoopy neighbors to be photographing me at every time of the day. I am not doing anything to deserve that level of suspicion. Not even criminals deserve this level of surveillance, it is abhorrent nonsense out of 1984. And we accept it just because we change the 'sur' to 'sous' on the grounds that the government is not allowed to do it? Believe me, if constant personal surveillance in every moment and place becomes generally socially acceptable, there will be nothing to stop 'surveillance'.

sliverstorm 13y ago
There won't even need to be any surveillance; the gov't can just review the sousveillance footage.
- diminoten 13y ago
  Sure, but we'll see 'em when they do, and then we'll see 'em again when they try to act on the info they've gathered, etc. We'll vote them out of office if they abuse their knowledge, because we'll know they've abused it.
  - wtbob 13y ago
    I think my sarcasmeter just pegged.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      I choose to believe the US system of checks and balances isn't broken.
      - krichman 13y ago
        It may not be broken but it definitely has been co-opted.
- e3pi 13y ago
  >There won't even need to be any surveillance; the gov't can just review the sousveillance footage. “If the NSA is big brother, Glassholes are the new little brother.” `Godwin's Law' Reductio ad Hitlerum: "Our NSA-Youth Corps wears Glass, shouldn't you?"(tm)
- JabavuAdams 13y ago
  Will "the government" exist in 100 years?
diminoten 13y ago
Can you elaborate on "abhorrent nonsense out of 1984" with a rational argument?
XorNot 13y ago
Cheap easily accessible recording devices have powered most civil interest in abuses of police power, the identification and capture of domestic terrorists and a few full out popular revolutions against corrupt government regimes. The constant refrain of "oh it's 1984" is completely at odds to the empowerment of the public that readily available and pervasive recording devices have given us - the cellphone camera has done more to prevent tyranny then that book ever will.
darkmighty 13y ago
You're already watched in the vast majority of public spaces you go to. However, you don't have direct access to this kind of footage for personal defense -- which just increases the susceptibility of our surveyors to corruption, abuse or simply omission. Moreover, I don't think your neighbors would be particularly interested in recording your life; what they see is already stored in their minds. Now in exceptional cases they _would_ be interested, such as spotting someone break into your house -- and also on their own defense, of course -- for example if you offended them. In any case, the case for the right of personal sousveillance is vastly stronger than against, as I see it.
- krichman 13y ago
  I think we should have the right to prevent Facebook-like companies from aggregating our friends' data about ourselves, that's the only problem I have with Glass. Ideally we'd be able to force a company to delete any recognisable image of ourselves that we haven't signed a release for. Especially when your friends and neighbours are going to screw up privacy settings (by Facebook's design) and share it with at least everyone they know.
  - hobs 13y ago
    Even though I will never be able to get this, I want this so much. People I know constantly over share and refuse to listen about how the information is being used, and I know I make it into their streams.
JabavuAdams 13y ago
You don't, but your grandkids probably won't care. Eventually you're going to elect priests and public officials (i.e. establishment authority figures) even though there are videos of them having sex and/or taking a shit. Because no one will care anymore. I don't think I'm ready for that future, but there will be benefits as well as the obvious negatives.

jka 13y ago

I've been pondering this for some time - sousveillance is arguably better than surveillance, in that it potentially allows people to shine a light on many more troubling situations - and keep evidence - and to some extent it reduces the 'surveillance disparity' between police/law enforcement and everyday citizens. That said, there are a lot of caveats with the road we're on just now. One of these is that Google is driving this forward as a single player, and - have no doubt - that's where they want to be. If we place all of our sousveillance content with one organization, then we place a lot of trust in that organization to keep it safe, not censor it against our wishes, and so forth. I trust Google a lot more than many, many other companies, but ultimately it is still possible for it to be strong-armed and pressured into doing things behind the scenes which may or may not be to everyone's benefit - or more typically, are to a specific cause's benefit, or for pure business reasons. For a truly open, transparent future we'd need some kind of distributed, reliable shared fabric into which sousveillance content could be stored - and also potentially analyzed if we want to make use of the additional benefits of image/video/audio recognition, tagging etc. And that's when the challenges of bandwidth, latency, availability of technical expertise, infrastructure cost, etc all come into play, so I think at least in the near term we are still looking at placing our trust in one of a few providers. PS: Also I'd add that sousveillance isn't a magical fix-all; if you have a recording of someone taking a swing at you with a weapon, that isn't evidence that you weren't spending the previous few hours tormenting them - there will be situations of selective editing and misrepresentation, just as there are in other forms of media.