So privacy is hard: to define, to value, to implement. As Seda Gürses, studying how to incorporate privacy into social networks, said, privacy is a process, not an event. “You can’t do x and say, Now I have protected privacy.”

Here are the slides I used in a short presentation on how privacy issues are being debated in the UK’s current general election:

It all had so much promise.  Google Goggles seemed like an incredible way to support human activity, to multiply our ability to understand and make use of the world, to grease the social wheels and bring us closer together.  Instead of shining a light however, it was taking us to a very dark place.

The ‘goggles’ are so simple: snap something with your camera phone, and get search results about it.  It’s a fantastic idea; an amazing achievement.  Sounds great doesn’t it – how could there possibly be any problems with this?  PVNets Principle Investigator Angela Sasse tells us in interview by The Independent – it all goes wrong when you start Goggling people.

“People manage their relationships by selective disclosure,” but Goggles shreds this delicate and nuanced practice.  “You might go somewhere on the assumption that you won’t be recognised. But if people find out who you are they can see where you have been.”  It’s true Goggles can only provide information about you that’s already floating about the internet – already in the public domain.  But, this is worse than it sounds.  You may not know what’s available about you on the internet.  Before people had to already know things about you before they could find out more – they needed your name or other personal information in order to find out more.  Now they just have to be nearby.  “Increased Accessibility” is a privacy challenge that changes the game entirely.  You may not know what information is out there on the internet about you, or you may know but not expect the information to be available to people.  You may not understand or be able to predict what happens when diverse information about you is combined, or used for purposes you didn’t expect when you put the information out there on the internet.  It may have been other people who put the information up there, without your consent.  Goggles is a hornet’s nest for Privacy.  That’s why Google has suspended it’s person recognition.

It’s hard to predict what effects Goggle’s “increased availability” technology would have.  Camera phones are pervasive, so it’s likely it’s effects would be too.  One likely impact is on social interactions, and it too could be negative.  Neal Stephenson’s novel “Snow Crash” describes “Gargoyles” – people strewn with sensing technology – cameras, mics, IR, radar, feeding everything around them into the internet to be catalogued and cross referenced.  The flow is two way – they live in augmented reality, and everything they see and sense is tagged and annotated – every one they meet is accompanied by a flood of information.  They know too much, “Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards”.  They tell you about yourself before you have a chance to tell them.  Selective disclosure, and the joys of getting to know you go out of the window.  Gargoyles are universally regarded as saddos, and avoided if whenever possible.

By suspending Goggle’s person recognition, the risks of privacy invasion against us have been averted.  Google has saved you from being dossier-ed in the street, your intimate details known by any Tom, Dick or Harry you unassumingly pass by.  The lure of invading others privacy has been withdrawn from us too – Google has saved us from ourselves, and it’s going to do our social lives no end of good.