The recorded world
Every step you take

As cameras become ubiquitous and able to identify people, more safeguards on privacy will be needed

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Glass may fail, but a wider revolution is under way. In Russia, where insurance fraud is rife, at least 1m cars already have cameras on their dashboards that film the road ahead. Police forces in America are starting to issue officers with video cameras, pinned to their uniforms, which record their interactions with the public. Collar-cams help anxious cat-lovers keep tabs on their wandering pets. Paparazzi have started to use drones to photograph celebrities in their gardens or on yachts. Hobbyists are even devising clever ways to get cameras into space.

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Ubiquitous cameras

It is getting ever easier to record anything, or everything, that you see. This opens fascinating possibilities—and alarming ones

This could easily edge over into areas consumers would find creepy. Take, for example, an idea on which Google applied for a patent in 2011: a camera that would keep track of which adverts and billboards its wearer noticed, and of any emotional responses they evoked. Glass cannot analyse its wearers’ world, or its wearers, anything like this well yet, and many companies patent ideas without planning to make use of them. But it is hardly paranoid to think that a company which says its mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” might be interested in looking over its users’ shoulders, if it can find a way to do so that they will think helpful and not find intrusive. If it could do so usefully and acceptably enough, Google could help users interrogate their own histories in much the same way as they now search for weather forecasts and celebrity news.

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At the same time, pressure from companies and from users who want new services may erode some of the privacy protections in Europe. Paolo Balboni of the European Privacy Association, a think-tank supported by large technology firms, argues that if some European countries choose to regulate Glass as if it were primarily a professional tool, not a personal one European users could lose out.

The personal-use point is crucial. Most legislation and regulation, at the moment, protects people’s privacy from companies and governments, to the extent that it protects them at all. What about a world in which, simply by living their lives, people create vast searchable records of all they have seen—a world, not of Big Brother, but of a billion Little Brothers? Most governments and most citizens have barely given the question a thought. When should people be able to have their images removed from another person’s non-commercial record? Does it matter if your life-log records the sexy stranger on whom your eye happens to fall without you explicitly asking it to do so? When should a wink be accompanied by the click of a camera shutter?

The fact that technology makes these things possible does not mean that law and regulation can put no check on them. But checks are unlikely to come about unless demanded. If people have accepted, as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has claimed, that privacy is no longer a “social norm”, few will make such demands—fewer still if ever richer digital memories offer real benefits. Mr Gurrin says that the life he has been logging has been improved by the process. He intends to keep the cameras on until he dies.