Facebook: The future is private! So private, we designed some handy new fingercams for y'all! Facebook, whose CEO in April declared, "The future is private," has applied to patent a system of coordinated finger-affixed cameras that allow wearers to live stream a panoramic view of their surroundings. Yes, you give Zuckerberg the finger, and he'll stick some kind of spy tracker on it. It was ever thus. The patent …
Anyone recently read The Circle by Dave Eggers and uncomfortably thinking about the transparent people?
For those who haven't read the book and not planning to (it is a good one), the transparent people are people coerced by pier pressure and the pressure of a massive fictional tech company, the titular Circle, to wear a camera that livestreams everything they see and do and keep it enabled at all times. As the company does this, they manage to use some benefits of the system (E.G. politicians not being able to engage in blatant corruption when on camera) to make it essentially mandatory for anyone important to wear one, which they then use to impose other types of surveillance on the world at large.
Agreed - this book is recommended, particularly for those of us who are worried about the erosion of privacy through (and by) social networking sites/companies. The book (and the documentary based on it) were the first things that came to mind when reading this article precisely because of the wearable cameras.
...go wrong with a system that uses gestures to turn on live streaming?
To control its hand-cams, Facebook engineers propose using gestures and movement patterns – a waving motion for camera activation or deactivation, a flicking motion to start recording, a wrist articulation to stop it, and a wrist rotation to broadcast live.
I wouldn't want to be the QA people tasked with testing the uncommanded start protections. And it'd only take a few "whoops, I just wanted to crack one out, but I've accidentally broadcast my cock to the world" incidents to sink this silly idea forever.
Oh my God. Are you kidding? Zuckerberg wouldn’t take down Christchurch because it might affect kids birthdays parties. I’ve been on the Internet since you had to telnet in. Facebook is literally the worst thing to happen to the world ever. I deleted my account, But knowing them they still have all my data.
I thought patents were for things that worked. They were meant to reward the thousands of hours spent developing a working light bulb (for example): testing different materials for the glass, the filament, different gases, different voltages and different fittings. The reward for solving practical problems with working solutions.
Since when have "ideas" been patentable? Have facebook actually done the work to develop and test such a system? Or is it just a vague idea?
If it is patentable, why haven't all SF writers patented the ideas in their novels?
> "Rather than simply covering the technology practiced in Facebook’s products and services, most of its patents focus on future-looking technology. For these reasons and others, patents should never be taken as an indication of future plans"
Have Facebook just admitted to being patent trolls?
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