I doubt I’m the first to think of this, but reading about Google Glasses made me think about crime-solving. What if people wear glasses with a camera that is constantly recording their lives (unless the owner turns this feature off), and quickly sends the recording to the cloud via wireless/4G/whatever? Normally no one has access to this video but the owner, but in case he/she is the victim of a crime, the police can view it.
How would criminals change their behavior if everyone, at all times, was recording what their eyes viewed, and automatically uploading it to the internet? Even if many people wouldn’t use this for privacy concerns, they might choose to wear a mockup to deter criminals.
I read a great sci-fi trilogy that touched on this theme a while back, Robert J. Sawyer’s The Neanderthal Parallax; relevant portion from the wiki article:
[spoiler]About eight decades before the time of the novels, companion implants were perfected and issued to all barasts. These are comprehensive recording and transmission devices, mounted in the forearm of each person. Their entire life is constantly monitored and sent to their alibi archive, a repository of recordings that are only accessible by their owner, or by the proper authorities when investigating an infraction, and in the latter case only in circumstances relevant to the investigation. Recordings are maintained after death; it is not made clear what the reasoning is for this and under what circumstances and or by whom a deceased person’s archive can be accessed.
Any serious crime has a single punishment: the castration of the offender and all others who share at least half his genes (parents, siblings and children). This eugenic practice serves to keep any undesirable elements out of the gene pool without severely punishing an offender, beyond his loss of genetic heritage.
As a result, serious crimes of almost any sort are virtually unknown in the barast world. The exception is sexual crimes committed by a partner. Because the punishment for such crimes, such as spousal abuse, would include the castration of the complainants own children, these crimes are unreported. While divorce for barast is generally a simple mater of deciding and declaring not to be with another person, those in such relationships find themselves trapped, as freeing their partner to seek a new mate opens the possibility that the new mate will report the violent activity.[/spoiler]
I recall similar technology played a small role in David Brin’s Earth; I recall a scene where a young man is walking through a neighborhood and irritated at how all the older people are staring at him with their camera/glasses because “of course” his youth makes him untrustworthy and a suspected criminal to them.
Useful in general, yes. But criminals adapt. The glasses wouldn’t help if you were alone and got jumped from behind + blindfolded, unless they also record sound.
I thought of this too. It’s obviously not foolproof, but police could easily ask anyone who was in the area to provide their Google Glasses data and look for suspicious characters and other evidence. So it’s not just the victim’s own data that could be useful, but anyone who was nearby at the time.
So maybe it wouldn’t totally end crime, but I think it might end most random muggings and assaults (including some rapes).
I’m not sure that people are willing to accept a technology that will constantly record their lives. I think a growing number of people are starting to have second thoughts about how much they post of Facebook due to privacy concerns. Would you really want to have every moment of your life recorded? What if your boss wanted to review what you actually were doing at work at 4:55 on a Friday afternoon?
Attitudes could change, but I just can’t see that people would want to record their lives constantly. In any case, there are simple countermeasures, some invented by clever 11 year olds on the schoolyard: knock the glasses off of the nerd before you attack him.
What if the only people in the area refuse to give up their data because they were doing something illegal that night and don’t want the cops to find out? Buying drugs, doing drugs, hiring a prostitute, driving drunk, speeding? Once this tech is available, you KNOW cops are going to get search warrants to subpoena the video (whether Google intends that or not). Safer not to wear them and leave that box closed.
Or perhaps rapists would all start wearing masks and killing their victims.
Well I don’t think it would make things worse. Even if just 10 or 20% of people wore these, though, I think it might prevent some crimes- especially if other people wear mockups.
I think that cheap video technology of all kinds, CCTV’s, smartphones, Google Glasses, will help reduce crime and it’s a good thing. There are privacy concerns and you need decent safeguards but the good outweighs the bad. And let’s not forget that these devices will deter police brutality as well as crime.
Wouldn’t work because no one would be able to ever look at the police. They have this thing about being recorded, almost lie they are concerned about the way they treat us citizen types.
No, but because this is not going to be nearly as popular as people keep thinking it will be. It will be the next video phone–something that you use occasionally as a novelty. I think people underestimate how annoying having a HUD at all times would be. We’re nowhere near the capability of making the virtual integrate with the real–it will be like an HUD, and, like the ones in cars, you’ll have to change your focus to read them.
I just don’t see how this would make any significant impact in crime. All this really adds is essentially recording a crime on video which may seem helpful, but we still see people rob places they know have video surveilance without any real attempt to conceal their identity. In short, you’ll still have people who just don’t consider it or don’t think they’ll get caught, and any halfway intelligent criminal could take very basic steps to conceal his identity like a mask, glove, and a fake voice.
You might be able to use it from the viewpoint of the criminal to witness their perspective of the crime. However, I think that would be tantamount to self incrimination. Even if it’s not, if someone can turn it off, surely they would, and that seems like it would lead to a bad argument of “well, if you have nothing to hide, why don’t you have it turned on?” It very much sounds like it could be used to shift the burden of proof onto the defendant, with a huge big-brother sort of air to it.
In short, it seems to me that this would be a pretty massive invasion of personal privacy with minimal impact on crime. I just don’t think this is a good idea at all.