The transparent society has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed.
I recently learned that 40% of all standalone cameras are purchased by the Chinese and U.S. governments. And it reminds me of this photo I took back at ’em at an early demo of the Fraunhofer Face Finder. The camera tracks the faces in the room and displays the following attributes for me in real-time:
• Emotional attributes of affect: I generally peg the happiness scale =))
• Age: 38 +/- 12 (their mean error is 6.85 years, and within 6 years in this case)
• Gender: Male (94.3% accuracy)
• ID: Assigned on the fly I presume, to track me over time (91.5% detection rate)
• Uptime: how long it has been tracking me, often unawares as I had conversations off in the distance.
The most eerie instance occurred some time later, when I was not thinking about the camera. I was having a spirited argument with a fellow who designs and sells high end AV cables. I argued “surely, you have to admit that fancy HDMI cables are a scam, right? It’s a digital standard. At normal cable lengths, it either works or it doesn’t. Are you selling the quality of the 0’s and 1’s?” Yes! He disdained double blind tests and insisted that somehow, magically, the blacks on the screen were more black with his cables. I was stupefied.
Then the screen caught my eye off in the distance; it spotted me in the crowd. It said I was Angry and Surprised.
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