TVblik, the Dutch portal for internet television has recently launched its personal files. In a personal file you can find the completely television oeuvre of the person in question. Take for instance the writer Susan Smit. Her profile appears and the media (DVDs and books) by her appear next to it. Of course you can order them directly from Dutch online mediaretailer bol.com (and through an affiliation program, TV Blik earns from this).
Then you can set an alarm clock for Susan andyou're given an email when a person has been in an episode together with a link to the episode. You'll never have to miss your favourite idols agian. A nice developmet, but thinking about this I see some privacy issues if anyone can be recognised anywhere. Read the scifi scenario.
Future vision by Erwin van Lun
As soon as people appear in public they’ll be conscious of the fact that others can see them: on the street, in the bar or in the media, we can follow it exactly and automatically. When someone makes a photo of a street you happen to be on this photo (like every photo) will be on the internet per definition and your fans will be given an email immediately: ‘Erwin spotted!’ with the exact location and time. This turns every individual unknowningly into a paparazzi.
The result of this will be that automatic facial recognition on photos will be chained. Someone will always make a photo somewhere. You’re always allowed to share them and that makes everyone on this earth trackable. Wigs and glasses won’t help, posture, movements and vocabulary will also be taken into account for the recognition. From a judicial point of view you could solve this by forbidding publically showing photos. That’s pretty far-reaching. That would mean you wouldn’t be able to shoot tv programs on the street. There could be people in there who don’t want to be seen at all. That means a lot of steps back. Another option is to ask everyone on the photo/video for permission. You can’t do that either. There’ll always be someone who says no. What you could also do is automatically remove everyone who says they don’t want to be recognised. But if a lot of people do that a lot of empty pictures will be created and that’s not the intention either. And a last option is allowing public recognition service only for people who have given permission for this. The question is if this’ll work. There’ll probably be illegal software that trawls the web to spot specific people for yo. That’s not going to work either.
I think it can only lead to an extremely open society. In which anyone can see anything, in which we have no more secrets from one another and in which we’re very tolerant of the behaviour of others. A world culture with shared norms and values. And beside this society we also have the ‘underground’ (which by the by will be above ground): a secret world in which the making of recordings, sensing and electronics will be strictly forbidden. The only world in which you can break the norms. A world of which everyone knows you’re ‘in it’, ‘are in it’, afterall you’ve ‘disappeared’ from the surface of the world. And that’ll be fine. We’re all human after all. But food for scifi authors.
