The Capture API and its possible social consequences

The W3C site contains a draft “ The Capture API ” - it describes a javascript interface with which the site can access the camcorder and microphone on the computer by a visitor to the site, can take photos, record videos, and record sound. This draft summarizes the idea of a similar proprietary the API ( the Google and the Nokia , in particular).

And it leads me to gloomy thoughts to know that the section “ Security and Privacy Considerations ” in this document only says that the site should not be able to take photos, videos and sound recordings without the consent of the visitor (that is, the owner of the client computer or mobile phone) .

What about the privacy of other people? Remember the July scandal with the English chief of foreign intelligence, which turned out to be revealed on Facebook by his wife literally to cowards, although he himself never registered on Facebook at all? Now, when sites are getting ready to see photo and video cameras with the wrong eyes, the whole world may be open to their eyes.

Imagine such a site, the visit of which allows the visitor to continuously transmit live video frames coming from the video cameras of his own mobile phone (geo-referenced via GPS, tilted along the accelerometer, rotated in the azimuth of a digital compass), and at the same time observe any point of the globe through the eyes of the same digital observers. Something like Google Street View, but in real time. Just turning the mobile phone in different directions, standing at one point on the globe (for example, in Ufa), you can choose to ozira “through” his screen (like through a window) the panorama of any other point of the Earth - some New York, San Francisco or Rio de Janeiro - if only therea sufficient number of passers-by with the same mobile phones, through which the same site looks into the world, has accumulated . At this time, the electronic “eye” of your mobile phone in the same way observes and saves on the website a panorama of the point at which you are standing.

An exciting, unprecedented impression, isn't it?

Now imagine yourself a simple person in a dense digital crowd. ^* You are constantly monitored by dozens of electronic eyes provided by anonymous volunteers. Any system of recognition of faces and personalities connected to such a site will allow you to easily track or restore the entire history of your movements around the city in the same way as an extensive Internet banner system tracks your movement across all its sites. Your jealous nutty admirer will find out what flowers you bought for your wife, and your health insurance company will find out how often you coughed while walking in the cold.

But in the real world there is no Adblock Plus. Digital crowds are n’t as easy to block as banner ads.

Bruce Sterling has a Maneki-neko story ; she is about the same. In commentsthey suggest that Vinj had something similar in his work. But one thing is fiction, and another thing is a draft API. The draft API is getting ready to become a reality.

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^* This blog entry introduces a new digital mitzgolism “digital crowd” in the narrow meaning of “a crowd of people in the real world whose digital video cameras are used in a distributed network vision system”. It can be further generalized to the meaning “a crowd of such people in the real world whose behavior and resources are used for the purposes and needs of a network site”.