Tried it yet? The trend of logging and posting everything that can be logged and posted: meals eaten, runs taken, places visited, people met… It’s the combination and extension of social media, that’s developing from status updates (Facebook) via images (Instagram) to video (Vine). They all still require user action, however, but the next step is a fly on the wall type technology that passively records everything you do, without you having to actually do anything. One example is Memoto, a camera that clips onto your collar, takes two photos per minute, geotags them and uploads them to your web photostream, so that all your friends can see what you’re doing, whom you’ve met, where you’ve been and what you had for lunch (plus what the plate looked like halfway through the meal). Sure you can go to a private mode and limit sharing, but the default is to invite the world to hang around your neck. Think about this for a second, then think about what things will be like in five years when the Memoto 5.0 launches with live streaming video and 5.1 audio. Or in ten years, when technology is advanced enough that you can search in your video stream for objects. Forgot your keys? Just search your lifelog for where you last saw them. Or in case somebody moved them, search their lifelog for where they left them (and send them an instant message to leave your keys alone!). If this trend picks up, dimensions like time and space will be less meaningful. Walk into a room, search all available lifelogs for what happened in that room before you came. Or as you ride the bus, follow a friend’s video stream live from a football game, a nightclub or just observe what he or she is cooking for dinner. Sure, lifelogging may end up not being a great hit at all. History is full of technologies that never caught on. But it could also be the next smartphone. In that case, we should start to think seriously about what it means in terms of privacy – what we’ve seen so far in terms of monitoring, intrusions, and scandals is just a breeze compared to what ubiquitous lifelogging would bring.
