A few months ago, my friend +
Nick Crawford
and I were pontificating on the future direction that Android, Google’s
cell-phone operating system, might take in the future. We eventually
found ourselves talking about life-caching. Nick referenced a book named
“
Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years”
by futurist Richard Watson. In his book, Watson talks about an idea
called “life-caching.” The concept is that essentially everything you
do, every conversation you have, every place you go, everything you look
at - literally everything - will be cached for indexing and at your
fingertips to reference at a later date.
Almost prophetically, in the last month, reports started to surface about something called “
Google Glasses”.
Recently we have seen promotional videos and pictures of Sergey Brin
wearing them in public. Google Glasses, now named “Project Glass” seems
like a very real possibility. If you have not had a chance to view the
promotional video check it out
here.
These “Google Glasses” allegedly communicate directly with the “Cloud”
over IP. From the video they seem to be focused on an augmented reality
experience with an included front-facing camera. It looks like Richard
Watson might be on to something.
Let me be clear about one thing. There is zero evidence that these
glasses cache or save anything without explicitly being directed to do
so... currently.
However, the possibility of life-caching IS a reality. There are some
important questions that need to be addressed if this technology comes
to fruition. Would you want to record every conversation you ever had if
you could? What about corporate laws? There is legal precedence about
personal email being sent using company assets. Granted, the device and
the internet connection would be paid for personally. It still does not
address if the conversations you have at work, during work hours, are
property of the company you work for or yourself?
What about expectation of privacy? If you are on private property that
you do not own, would you need the consent of individuals present to
record them? If one could selectively turn the caching on and off would
you be willing to adopt the technology? Could there be a “Do Not Record”
database or list? If John Smith is on this list and his likeness,
voice, email address, or personal information appear to Google Glass,
could they act like the Nixon tapes and stop recording or using the data
creating a gap?
What are the ramifications if your every location was recorded?
Technically that already occurs passively through our carriers. Actively
it occurs through apps like Google Latitude. However, there is a
difference as no video or audio recordings of our journey from point to
point is recorded by those two sources.
Again, this is all a leap of the imagination based on what we’ve seen
through a simple promotional video. However, in 50 years, chips, memory,
and technology will be cheaper, faster, and smaller. Perhaps the MPEG15
standard would make creating and storing video content trivial due to
compression techniques that have yet to be developed.
More importantly, could your location information be used against you in
a court of law? Suppose your public profile showed you were a block
away from where a crime was committed. Could law enforcement have
probable cause to obtain a warrant to obtain your life-cached
information?
Here's a potential "what if" that life-caching could make possible:
While walking down the street, in your peripheral vision you record a
crime with your glasses. You may not even realize it if you are looking
at the center of the scene. Even if you do not have video of the actual
crime, you may have video of the get-away vehicle. Could the police
compel you with a search warrant to turn over video if they knew you
were in the vicinity at the time the crime was committed?
To make life-caching a reality, the only real bottle neck at this point
is a cloud service with enough storage. The connections via 4G are fast
enough. We currently can stream live video, instantly upload pictures,
and record our own locations with our existing mobile phones. There is
just no single service that will store it all via a 24/7 stream. Future
connections to this hypothetical server will become even faster when
true 4G “
LTE-Advanced”
is rolled out. Another problem, besides where to store all of that
data, is more importantly how to index it for use later. If only a
company with search and indexing expertise were behind Google Glass…
Again, I realize we are a ways off from true life-caching as I or
Richard Watson describe it. However, the questions need to be asked
today to prepare ourselves for when the answers will be required
tomorrow. This type of technology and service will eventually find its
way to market. It may not be a collective service package for 5, 10 or
50 years. Assuming the Mayans are wrong, it will occur at some point in
the human/technology evolution. I for one would welcome some form of
this. I can tell you that as a married father of two it might lessen the
amount of disagreements in my house. As I get older, I also find myself
writing things down on more and more sticky notes. Life-caching; think
about it.
