Two compelling applications for universal surveillance

Face recognition is pretty good now: you can upload a picture to Facebook and it will automatically identify who is in the frame. Combine this with Google Glass and the idea of lifelogging: what can these technologies do as prosthetic memories?

I am at a party and I meet someone I am sure I have met before, but I can't remember. I could try talking to them until I get enough context to remind myself of their name, or I could just wink to take a photo, which is uploaded and annotated, and then I know their name, employer, marital status, and I have a picture of our last photographed encounter. Oh yes, now I remember! And we have saved a few minutes of embarrassing protocol negotiation and impedance matching.

But why wink? If I am lifelogging, everything I do gets uploaded. So when I see someone, I can be automatically reminded to say happy birthday, or that I need to give them the thing I offered to lend them. Contextual social cues!

How much embarrassment we could avoid! How sooner we could get to the fun part of the conversation!

(This post was inspired by a pub conversation with Ian Jackson and Mark Wooding; Simon Tatham suggested the auto-reminder feature.)