What Will Augmented Reality Do to Our Privacy and Basic Instincts?

The Future is Almost Here:

What Will Augmented Reality Do to Our Privacy and Basic Instincts?

Written by Dan Cyr

So let’s say you are walking down the street with your new augmented reality glasses on. Someone on the other side of the street starts to approach you. Before they even get within 10 feet of you, your high tech glasses performed a facial recognition search on the person and found out everything about them. You know where they live, whether or not they have a criminal record, where they went to school and even what their last Facebook status message was.  Finding out they are new to the area, you assume they are just looking for directions and allow the person to approach. What if you found out this person was a registered sex offender (public information) or someone that the police were looking for? What would you do then? Would you run? Call the police? Augmented reality is not only going to touch the limits on privacy and security, but the way humans behave as well.

Reflecting on this near future scenario is exactly what Allesandro Acquisti wants you to do. In his 90-minute presentation to the students at the University of Carnegie Mellon, he explains how augmented reality will change many things. He explains a scary world where faces will be the conduit between online and offline data. “Personal Predictable Information” or PPI as he references it, will be used to make inferences about you and they may be good or bad inferences. Like the situation above, the person could have been a convicted felon but a changed, rehabilitated man. With PPI in the mix, the person wearing the AR glasses would most likely walk in the opposite direction since an inference was made on that other person’s PPI. The two worlds of online and offline data will be blended together where people will not be able to notice the difference. Social networks will act as the “real ID” for people and surveillance on people’s lives will now be easier to do.

With PPI and “Real ID’s” in social networks, what does that due to our basic behavioral instincts? We were born with the “flight or fight” gene. What happens when we do not need this basic behavior anymore? How will we evolve? What will happen if our augmented reality device isn’t working and we are placed in a situation that may call for that basic instinct? These are all scary questions that Allesandro wants us to be ready for. This is why he ends his presentation with almost a warning and says “be prepared for what the future has in store for us” with a reference to the Minority Report.

Are we ready?

Video: “Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality” by Allesandro Acquisti