This kind of app is a required step for making augmented reality devices part of the social media ecology. Therefore, this tech will become a standard for all mobile devices – merchants and advertisers want us as an army of data collectors on each other.
OTOH, automatic face-recognition and social media aggregation raises serious concerns about the potential dangers of living under a panopticon state if an app is aggregating and bundling all your online data in real time, while giving out your GPS and home address. A godsend to stalkers, oppo researchers, con men, disgruntled spouses or employees, autocratic governments and other creepy malefactors. Expect businesses, which are already attempting to illegally pry and spy into all areas of employee’s lives, to make surreptitious use of apps of this nature
Puts the protests to revolution in Egypt and Tunisia in perspective, doesn’t it?
If the FCC wanted to do something useful and promoting of liberty, they might consider regs to let individuals exercise greater control the use third parties would have to their collective online IDs – then you could be “out there” or not or to the degree you liked. Some people, do want to be “out there” professional or social reasons. While you cannot control pictures of yourself in a public space, I’m not sure the Supreme Court thought that your presence in public meant that random strangers and government officials should be able to run your credit history as you sit at a table in a restaurant or bar or take in a movie or ball game by taking your photo. A similar logic underlies state laws prohibiting wiretapping or making auditory recording individuals without their knowledge and consent (Illinois being one such state where Chicago aldermen and state legislators have acquired a healthy fear of recording devices).
Speaking of government, I have been told by an authoritative source that the USG rsearch is far advanced in this area. Probably a lot further along than is Viewdle, but perhaps not.
One thing leads to another, and building that DoubleQuote made me want to include another picture of a man with a tank — from a somewhat but by no means entirely similar situation a couple of decades back…
which led me in turn to this:
But then, you know, this is the web, and while searching for some URLs to give you so you could look at these images full size and with the appropriate attributions, I stumbled across yet one more image for my peaceful uses tanks can be put to collection, and realized there’s more than one way to relax with a tank while you decide what to do next…
That a single image speaks louder than dozens of words. That we are more easily persuaded by images than by words. That FB and Twitter are clearly important to Egyptian youth. That dozens of words can convey nuances that a single image misses. That FB and Twitter were at best among the vehicles, rather than the drivers, of the events of January 25th.
That we’d do well to bear the Aristotelian distinction between material, formal, efficient and final causes in mind when talking about what “caused” or “becaused” those events – and elsewhere.
That the simple juxtaposition of two closely similar ideas can illuminate both, and perhaps create a spectral “third thing” which possesses the full detail of both with greater depth than either one in a single understanding, by a sort of stereo process not too different from stereoscopic vision or stereophonic sound.
My twitteramigo @ckrashas put your tax dollars to work attempting to shatter the stovepipes of analytical excellence in the IC.
And it is pretty cool…..notice how issues of lines of authority and reliability of information are facilitated and made infinitely more efficient with off the shelf Web 2.0.
The nice thing about this project of @ckras is that his model can be generalized to any large organization or system where bureaucratic complexity and the territoriality of guarding tiny empires is gumming up the timely flow of information into the right hands.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
