On March 13, 2014, I gave the special guest presentation at the Embedded Vision Alliance membership meeting on the Qualcomm campus in San Diego, California.
Titled "Who Watches the Machines Watching You? Regulating Privacy in the Era of Machines That See" (and delivered a week before Sen. Rand Paul's ovation-inspiring speech in Berkeley on "watching the watchers"), my talk gave a high-level overview of privacy law in the United States, how embedded vision devices are challenging our notions of privacy, and what can be done about it. As the leading industry association of companies involved in various aspects of intelligent mechanical vision technology, the EVA is keen to spread understanding of how the technology fits into society.
Here is a brief outline of my talk; below is a copy of the Prezi visuals that accompanied it.
- Overview of Privacy Law
- The Elephant in the Room: the First Amendment
- Common Law Invasion of Privacy
- Eavesdropping
- The patchwork quilt of privacy statutes
- Surveillance & Sousveillance
- Law Enforcement & Security
- Commercial / Retail Data
- Sousveillance and Wearable Technology
- Facial Recognition / Detection
- How it works
- Demand from law enforcement, commerce and consumers
- The social upsides and downsides
- The consequences of data enhancement and errors
- Losing our anonymity in a crowd
- Potential legal frameworks
- What to Do?
- Consent
- Self-regulation by individual companies
- Encryption
- New mechanisms for choice
- New Industrial norms
