The Capture API and its possible social consequences

The W3C site contains a draft “ The Capture API ” - it describes the javascript interface with which the site can access the video camera and microphone on a computer from a site visitor, can take photographs, videotapes, and sound recordings. This draft summarizes the ideas of similar proprietary APIs ( Google and Nokia , in particular).

And it leads me to dark thoughts to know that the “ Security and Privacy Considerations ” section in this document only says that the site should not be able to take photographs, videotaping and sound recordings without the consent of the visitor (that is, the owner of the client’s computer or mobile phone) .

What about the privacy of other people? Remember the July scandal with the English foreign intelligence chief who turned out to be on Facebook exposed by his wife literally to his underpants, although he himself had never been registered on Facebook at all? Now, when the sites are preparing to see the camera cameras with the eyes of others, the whole world may be open to their eyes.
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Imagine such a site, a visit to which allows a visitor to continuously transfer to this site live video footage coming from their own mobile phone’s video camera (geotagged via GPS, tilted by the accelerometer, rotated in the azimuth of a digital compass), and at the same time observe any point on the globe through the same digital observers. Something like Google Street View, but in real time. Just turning the mobile phone in different directions, standing at one point on the globe (for example, in Ufa), you can look at your choice “through” its screen (as through a window) the panorama of any other point on Earth - some New York, San Francisco or Rio de Janeiro - if only there were enough passers-by with the same mobile phones through which the same site looks into the world . At the same time, the electronic “eye” of your mobile phone in the same way reviews and stores on the site a panorama of the point at which you are standing.

Exciting, unprecedented impression, is not it?

Now imagine yourself a simple person in a dense digital crowd. ^* You are under the continuous observation of dozens of electronic eyes provided by anonymous volunteers. Any system of recognition of persons and personalities connected to such a site will allow you to easily track or restore the entire history of your movements around the city in the same way as an extensive Internet banner system tracks your movement through all its sites. Your jealous psychotic admirer finds out which flowers you bought for your wife, and your health insurance company finds out how often you coughed while walking in the cold.

But in the real world there is no Adblock Plus. Digital crowds are not as easy to block as banner ads.

Bruce Sterling has the story of Maneki-neko; it is about the same. The comments suggest that Vinge had something similar in his work. But one thing is fiction, and another thing is a draft API. The draft API is preparing to become a reality.

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^* This blog post introduces a new mizgolizm "digital crowd" in the narrow sense of "a crowd of such people in the real world, digital photo cameras which are used in the system of distributed network vision." It can be further generalized to the meaning of “a crowd of such people in the real world, whose behavior and resources are used for the purposes and needs of the network site”.