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'Life-Logging' camera that takes photo every 30 seconds shrugs off privacy concerns

By Mark Leiser, Research Fellow

September 2, 2013 | 4 min read

Following the pioneering work of Microsoft engineer Gordon Bell, a young Swedish entrepreneur has shrugged off any privacy concerns and launched a new camera that takes a picture every thirty seconds.

Would you “life-log”? If life-logging has passed you by, here is a brief recap: A group of wearable technology, rather than blending digital graphics with your vision, as with augmented/mediated reality, life-logging attempts to document your daily life through either captured video or still photography. The concept was made famous by Microsoft engineer Gordon Bell. Bell uses a system called MyLifeBits which “pulls together all the strands of his online and offline life and makes them searchable through tagging and contextual linking”. A wearable camera developed by Microsoft Research, called SenseCam, is studded with sensors that trigger shots when light, movement, temperature and proximity to another person is detected.Following from Bell, a young Swedish entrepreneur has shrugged off any privacy concerns and launched a new camera that takes a picture every thirty seconds of its owner’s life. The device is worn with a clip on shirt or a jacket and is designed without an on-off button to take a photograph every thirty seconds. Martin Kaellstroem, who founded the company Memoto, has shrugged off comparisons to George Orwell’s 1984 and other dystopian novels.
"Traditionally, people only brought their camera to special events when everyone was dressed up, smiling into the camera," Kaellstroem said."But you don't know in advance which moments will be important in the future. Perhaps you meet your future wife or witness an accident or a crime, pictures you might want to return to."The product – essentially a 1.4 inch square with a small hole for a camera, was funded by a Kick-starter campaign that brought in over $550,000 from 2871 funders. The camera is estimated to take in over 1.4 terabytes of data in each individual year. If you buy the device (which is retailing at $279), the company provides the first year of storage and each consecutive year it will cost $9 per month – a hefty price for storing 1/3 of the images appearing to the user sleeping. In order to maintain some sort of categorization to the captured images, the company has developed an app. Images are said to be collected and displayed in the app’s format, and will be available for the user in order to view a group of “moments” in a timeline. The accompanying app compromises between these realistic and perfect versions of memory. It mimics the former by automatically breaking days into 20 or 30 activities--as determined by changes in light, colour, and GPS coordinates--and picking just one image to represent each of those activities on a timeline. Nicolas Johansson, who leads Special Projects Management at the company added: “When we recollect things, that’s how we remember them, and that’s what the algorithm is designed to replicate.”
However, the company seems to get around Europe’s complex data protection laws rather haphazardly by asking users not to circumvent any official photo ban and to respect other people’s privacy by not sharing photos when asked. As the company states on the camera’s official Kick-starter page, “Legally, you may photograph what you want, as long as you don’t obviously infringe someone else’s integrity or violate an official photo ban.” A sentence that is woefully inadequate in our current climate for data protection and privacy. With a rather challenging regulatory climate for photographers who have full autonomy over what pictures they snap, it is rather difficult to justify this level of intrusion into public life, yet Johansson makes a good attempt to do so: “Photos make sense as contextualizers for all that data [from the quantified self-movement].”
By saving data like GPS coordinates and which direction the camera is facing along with the photo, Memoto has also positioned itself for possibilities such as putting together all of the photos taken from one place into a 3-D map or allowing users to opt into a photo pool when they’re at the same event.One question that remains to be answered is whether or not people will wear one of these cameras in the first place. The company seems to be relying on a public wanting to document their entire lives in picture format. If humans were meant to have photographic memories, then shouldn’t we have evolved that way?

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