Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Linux.com promoting Google Glass? (was: Re: libreplanet-discuss Digest, Vol 41, Issue 14)

[Ted Smith]

On Sat, 2013-05-18 at 23:31 -0400, Ricky Mujica wrote:
> > (quote from Ted Smith <tedks@riseup.net>)
> > The best social solution for this problem is to attack centralized
> > surveillance, since it seems much more harmful overall than
> > decentralized surveillance. I can't think of any horrible things
> > decentralized surveillance has done, but I can think of several
> positive
> > things it's done (the Rodney King tape and a large number of similar
> > tapes, the Russian meteor footage).
> >
> >
> 
> 
> Don't forget that decentralized surveillance helped catch the Boston
> Bombers in record time. 

Actually, this event was more of a negative -- decentralized
surveillance, and volunteer policing got several people falsely accused
of being the bombers, and one person ended up being deported as a
result.

However, it doesn't seem like Google Glass would make this event
significantly different -- events like the Boston Marathon are already
heavily "surveilled" in a decentralized way.

To try to tie this back to software freedom, there are a few things that
you'd need to have safe decentralized surveillance:

      * The abolition of features like the photo auto-upload to google
        plus in Android. Any picture uploaded to G+ can't be "deleted"
        in any meaningful sense. This is a classic 'antifeature' from a
        privacy sense.
      * Free mobile platforms with the ability to truly strip any
        identifying metadata from media, allowing activists to share
        that media (possibly after editing out faces or other
        identifying characteristics) without fear of reprisal. Existing
        free software that already does this: Obscuracam, by the
        Guardian Project: https://guardianproject.info/apps/obscuracam/

The best google glass angle I can see is that having free platforms
makes it easier to remedy privacy problems inherent in having pervasive
decentralized surveillance. As it stands, Google could easily
'auto-upload' everything from all the Glass devices just because they
aren't free, and turn decentralized (and mostly benign) surveillance
into centralized (and highly threatening) surveillance. 

-- 
Sent from Ubuntu

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