[extropy-chat] Enhancing Our Truth Orientation

[Hal Finney]

I did a little research into the state of the art on wearable always-on
recording devices.  I found two types.  There are digital audio recorders
sold at "spy shops" designed primarily for investigative use.  These can
record typically about 24 hours of audio and then upload it to a computer.
They often have voice-activated recording so they don't waste space on
quiet times.  However I'm not sure they timestamp the data as far as
when they turn on and off.

These are quite expensive, apparently made for professional spies.  Here
is one for $450, http://www.4hiddenspycameras.com/midire8mireb.html.
Here's another for 160 pounds,
http://www.spy-equipment.co.uk/Digital_Recorder/digital_recorder.html.
This one is primarily for phone recording, but also has a tie-clasp
microphone, $280, http://store.yahoo.com/spytechagency/digmicrechou.html.

The other class of devices do the same thing for video.  However
these are all research prototypes and don't yet exist for commercial
sale.  The closest commercial device is the Deja View Camwear 100,
http://www.mydejaview.com/.  This is an always-on video recorder
that constantly records the last 30 seconds of video.  When something
interesting happens you press a button and it saves that data.  However it
only has a 4 hour battery life and it sounds like it can hold only an
hour or so of video.  It's $380 at Amazon.

Research projects include HP Labs' Casual Photography,
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2004/jan-mar/casualcapture.html.
This is more oriented towards taking still images but does capture
video.  Microsoft Research has something called the SenseCam,
http://research.microsoft.com/research/hwsystems/.
This is tied into their MyLifeBits project,
http://research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/MyLifeBits.aspx ,
which has gotten quite a bit of publicity.  It is designed to let you
store everything about your life, digitally.

There was also a grad student's project in the MIT Media Lab's wearable
computing lab.  It is described in a Scientific American Frontiers
video at http://www.pbs.org/saf/1309/video/watchonline.htm.  It is the one
called Never Forget A Face, and it's a little over halfway through the
15-minute video.  You can also read the entire transcript in the pop-up
menu on the web page.  Scroll about 60% of the way down until Alan Alda
says, "So far, we've been looking at wearable computers designed to help
you with what you're doing.  Brian Clarkson is wearing a computer that
keeps its eyes on what he's already done."

Clarkson spent 100 days wearing a backpack-based recorder he designed,
with a camera on his chest and on his back.  I'm guessing that the size
of the backpack was largely due to battery issues.  Interestingly, he
met his girlfriend during that time period, and he talks about how he
can go back and review their first meeting, see how he acted and what
their first reactions were to each other.  He plays it back for Alda in
the segment, and they notice how the girl seems to be checking out some
other guys in the restaurant when they go out to eat.

There was a paper that came out last year by some Princeton
students, Privacy Management for Portable Recording Devices,
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/papers/wpes2004.pdf.  It describes
a cryptographic technique by which people could collectively give assent
to be recorded and have some control over how the data would be recovered
and viewed.  I remember when this came out I thought there were some
problems with their security model and crypto, though.

Overall I think Brian Clarkson's MIT project was the most impressive of
these, in terms of actually trying to live life with an always-on recorder
and getting a feeling for what the issues are.  Unfortunately it was
apparently never written up as a formal paper.  But hopefully in a few
years his backpack-sized device will be something that everyone can wear.

Hal