When everybody is walking around with those future wearables, it will be technically possible for you to see all sorts of information about a person you are meeting for the first time. For example, you might see an annotation telling you that person’s age, or their net worth, or their prison record.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean those things will happen. As rules about privacy shake out, it might become illegal to see certain kinds of information about another person.
Clearly the concept of privacy has been evolving, as new generations embrace the convenience of SmartPhones. People really like the ability to see where they are on a map, or hail a car whenever and wherever they need one, or quickly order things on-line.
With such conveniences at one’s fingertips, niceties such as not being on the radar of governments and major corporations tend to get overlooked. But will that trend continue when we make the transition from SmartPhones to wearables?
Will there be certain kinds of information that could certainly be looked up with some effort (such as a person’s age or religion or sexual preference), which will be deemed inappropriate to be instantly accessed by random strangers on the street? I honestly don’t know the answer, but I think this is a good time for us to start asking the question.
The backlash against ClearView AI is probably a good early indicator of how this will shake out. Legislating against face recognition is similar to preventing the harvesting of phone / wearable information.
Of course, rules didn’t stop ClearView from simply ignoring various Terms of Service agreements, and scraping up all the info they could anyway.