In recent years one of the big concerns that some civil liberty groups have expressed about the US government has been around a program called Total Information Awareness. This system was intended to be a massive database of personal information about, well, us – a huge collection of content that can be filtered and sorted by CTU… err, I mean Homeland Security, to help fight terrorism.
I won’t debate the pros or cons about that idea (but, as a libertarian, you can probably guess my opinion) but instead I bring this up to note that similar concerns have been expressed about another huge data system that has an incredible amount of personal information about Americans… Google.
No, I’m not one of those “OMG Google is spying on us” types, I just think we are about to enter a new era very soon where Total Information Awareness is not something that we will need to be afraid of – it will be something that all of us are going to have access to, anywhere we are.
Two examples: First, there are the augmented reality apps that are being developed by many different companies allows you to use your mobile device’s camera and GPS to “see” additional details about your surroundings. The best example of this I have seen is in the Yelp app, which gives you contextual information about restaurants, shops, and more in this manner.
Second is Google Goggles, another piece of “beta” software that is kind of “augmented reality on steroids.” It allows you to access similar contextual knowledge, only n this case it is not limited to restaurant, entertainment or shop reviews – you can take a picture of a neighborhood and Google will give you information about where you are, all from that really big database they are managing of, well, EVERYTHING. They won’t do facial recognition, out of privacy concerns… but who’s to say someone else won’t push that technology out there, to get a jump on Google in this new metadata-filled space?
When you can install Google Goggles on Android phones and Yelp on that and other devices, for free, I think you are seeing a new and challenging area that we as users and designers need to be very very cautious about. The potential for information overload is greater than ever when you can access such contextual information anytime, anywhere… not to mention the potential for abuse (especially if the facial recognition stuff is eventually made public).
The world is changing, and as I said before, the future has arrived – it’s just not the one we were expecting. Let’s remember (quoting that great scientist Jeff Goldblum) that just because technology allows us to do something doesn’t mean we should.