For those of you who remember my post from three years ago, we asserted that the best way to deal with images of people, cars, and other moving objects in Street View (and by extension Microsoft’s own StreetSide product) was not to blur, but to remove them entirely. They could always be re-added in a variety of forms, ideally as dynamic 3D objects.

Looks like it’s taken a while, but the simplest method of removing people — comparing successive images for similarities — works pretty well. Congrats to the grad student who pulled this off. Nice work.

So let’s summarize the list for the impatient few. Here’s what those crazy HACKERS are targeting RIGHT NOW:

1. Your Car(*)  –they can start your car electronically, because that never happened with 10 minutes and a pair of wire cutters under the dash.
2. Your GPS(*) — they can track you remotely, because hackers really want to know where the happening spots are and are too lame to use social networking.
3. Your Cellphone — they can take over your phone, which, if you use AT&T, will do exactly nothing.
4. Your Front Door(**)  — they can open it remotely, because smashing a window is too low-tech for most criminals. Let’s spend several hours cracking your crappy security system to steal a bunch of Hummels.
5. Your Blender(**) — they can turn it on. Ooh, killer frappes. Once they can turn it on and make it fly across the room, then I’ll be worried.
6. Your Printer(*) — they can print stuff remotely, maybe even see your crappy photos from last vacation. Extremely creepy… and useless, unless you regularly print your credit card number, in which case you should be more concerned about shredding your physical trash.
7. Your Digital Camera(*) — they can see what you snapped, maybe even photoshop the pictures and replace them before you download them. Fark contest anyone?
8. Your Electricity (i.e., power outlets) — they can… wait, it needs the smart grid for anyone to hack anything? Never mind. Ten years out (but yes, let’s make the smart grid smart about security. Good idea.).
9. Your Body(**) — they can hack into that high tech bionic arm the US government didn’t pay for when they got your real one blown off. Otherwise, you’re pretty safe for at least 10 or 15 years here.
10. Your Brain (**)  — never mind the fact that your brain is usually considered part of your body, they can use social engineering to make you fear everything and obey. Yes, like Fox is doing it right now. OMG! Hackers!

caveats:

*   if it allows wireless/automatic firmware updates over insecure networks that hackers can get you to use
** if it’s networked and allows remote operation that hackers can, um, hack.

Let’s add a few items to their list, shall we?

1. Your TV — FoxNews controls everything you watch, unless you change the channel or turn it off.
2. Your Government — remember the 2000 and 2004 elections? Eight years of Bush may be due to bad software and corrupt election officials with special compact flash cards (see Al Gore’s negative 16000 votes in Florida).
3. Your Life — why do you even listen to these people who tell you what to buy, wear, think, and vote? They don’t care about you. They don’t even like you. In fact, they think you’re retarded, and they like it that way.

Now, it’s not the same kind of marketing lie that tells you to buy an expensive car to attract women. Conceivably there could be a sexy woman who digs you for your car. Really. It’s happened. Once or twice, maybe.

But 3D Displays literally can’t do what they’re often depicted as doing: namely making 3D images appear in space. They just can’t, outside of science fiction.

Case in point (from the esteemed MIT Technology Review no less — shame shame…)

Here’s a simple rule of thumb. There needs to be a pixel on the display behind every part of the 3D image you see. By "behind," I mean you can draw a straight line from your eye through the virtual object and hit a pixel of the display. If there’s no pixel at the far end of that line or the line hits something else instead of the display, there’s no virtual 3D object in that point in space. Except through gravity, lenses, and mirrors, light does not bend.

So here’s what the phone above would actually look like in reality. The nice glow-y characters are suddenly cut off by the sad, cruel laws of physics. (The white robot’s left arm would also be cut off by the bezel, but you get the idea)

Not so beautiful now, is it? Here are a few more examples from a quick image search:

This example is slightly more passable. Here they’re trying to show you what the guy and his son would see. Including the audience (esp. with realistically goofy glasses) makes a difference in terms of the message conveyed. [The front bumper of the blue car would still be cut off behind the bottom bezel, IMO, but that's nitpicking.]

Astute readers will tell me that there are volumetric 3D displays that can make stuff appear in air. Yes, in an enclosed volume with spinning mirrors, moving LEDs, or whatnot. But actually what’s happening here is that there’s a display pixel behind the object as required — but the pixel itself may be moving or obscured.

So for the spinning mirror, for a microsecond light reflects from a hidden display into your eye at that precise 3D spot in space. Next microsecond, the light comes from somewhere else as the mirror moves.

Even the old swinging LED trick has a pixel light up in space — it just moves to fast you don’t think of there being a display there, at least not a solid one.

Fog screen? Similar issue, different optics. A traditional projector hits fog or water particles and they refract light from that point in space into your eye. The particles are the pixels in this case, but the light source is remote, often hidden. Also, fog screens suck at 3D because, even though they can do field-sequential active stereo if needed, they can’t restrict the glow to just one 3D point, but rather work like god rays on a cloudy day. That appears a lot like cross-talk, which is the fatal flaw of a lot of TVs on the market.

Parabolic mirrors can make an object seem to float above an opening. That’s pretty cool. But you’re effectively seeing through the hole, light bouncing off mirrors, to a pixel of a display (or a real object hidden inside). Even holograms have this property, that there needs to be a holographic pixel behind (or in front of) the virtual object you want to see, relative to your eye.

The only true exception would be a laser projector that somehow shines into your eye from across the room, and even then this would require some neat tricks to get the right spot on your retina lit up. No one has done this yet, and I recon it would still require a lens near or on your eye.

Even my favorite "VR Contact Lens" idea from way back is essentially a set of pixels, the only difference here is that the pixel is in front and you’re seeing through it.

I predict a big 3D backlash, not just for this, but for the undue crosstalk I’m seeing on the market today. Long-term, though, I’m still bullish on 3D. Just look very carefully before you buy anything.

Social contracts work best when the benefits are clearly laid out. You pay your taxes and the government ostensibly protects your property, your greater economic interests, and even your life. It’s not entirely unlike Big Al’s cousin Vince and his baseball bat offering you protection for a modest fee, except in Vince’s case the only benefit is an absence of malice. The government does actually do some good for people, which is why we elect to keep it around, even though we may occasionally elect professional clowns who undermine that goal.

When it comes to internet companies, the bargain should be even more explicit. Many of these companies don’t bill you, so the true cost  (and I guarantee there is is one, if there is a benefit to the company) is murky at best. For Google, the employees honestly believe (and they could be somewhat right) that serving you better, more relevant ads is in your interest and is therefore totally win/win for everyone. If more relevant ads means fewer ads, then I’d tend to agree.

Of course, they make billions of dollars off your eyeballs and you may save only a little time or effort, so it’s hardly a 50/50 split. Microsoft is a little more up front about the bargain. Use Bing to buy stuff, they say, and they’ll give you a small cut of the proceeds, some "cash back." Well, they can certainly afford it. Who knows if it’s working, but at least it’s the kind of bargain I can get behind.

But Facebook is another story. I’ve been getting a lot more friend requests lately, and I never turn old friends down, even though I don’t ever use the site for actual social networking. I’m willing to grant Facebook knowledge of whom I know, but little else.

Why? Because they don’t offer much of a bargain. In fact, it’s kind of crappy.

Their terms are basically this: tell us everything about yourself and we’ll use that for whatever we can dream up to make money with your info. Oh, and you get the opportunity to talk more often to your friends, whom you knew before Facebook but it was just too much trouble to keep in touch. So hit the ‘like’ button and we’ll do it for you.

Let’s face it, we’re lazy. And for our sloth, we grant Facebook a virtual monopoly on our personal social data, which is invaluable to any company engaged in marketing. How invaluable? Knowing who and what we like is a recipe for picking the best ad to show us, which equals big bucks because companies who sell things will pay a much larger percentage of their profits for a more guaranteed sale. Just ask Google. This is a sixty billion dollar bet. This is gold.

But is the bargain even real? I could (and did) write algorithms to take your social graph, find who you trust and how you trust them, and basically automate the process of recommending things from friends, friends of friends and so on — i.e., automated word of mouth, like the stuff we do every day when someone suggests a restaurant.

Next up after that, one could imagine automated wall and status posts, making it clear to all your friends how much you value their friendship using some AI agent that comes up with interesting things on your behalf. No, I’m not working on that. I work in XBox now, where you may simply choose to pay us for entertainment — a much more straightforward bargain.

So let’s recap. The benefit of Facebook to you is the feeling of social connectedness. The cost is your privacy. The benefit to Facebook is billions of dollars from people who want to sell you something.

Let’s ask Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, about the subject of privacy:

…Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who once blacklisted CNet for publishing info about him that was found through Google) in a CNBC interview recently said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Eric goes on to say, “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we’re all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act… it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

Ah, there’s the government again. So not only is every drunken photo going to wind up in a job application file some day, but we have to now consider that some future authoritarian regime will use whatever we say or do to find us worthy of investigation or worse because simply of who we know, what they did or didn’t do, etcetera, ad nauseum. What you say or do now will be known forever, and you’ll have no chance to go back and retroactively delete what you don’t want out there.

There goes the tin foil hat alert, full glint, right? Unfortunately, this scenario already happened, not too long ago. The Bush administration collected call records from our phone companies, not the contents of the calls (though maybe that too in too-broadly a manner), but at the very least the database of who called who — in other words, the social network, of the same sort that Facebook collects. Phone companies are theoretically regulated from abusing your call data to make money. Facebook, not so much.

Anyway, on a cheerier note, there’s a pretty simple solution to this whole privacy mess. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others should declare that any user data they collect from or about you is implicitly owned by you, licensed to them for certain business uses, but all other rights are reserved by you. That’s it. That’s the world’s biggest change in terms of service since the EULA began. Treat your data like property, which it essentially is.

What it would do is require companies to be explicit about what rights they want to take from you, and you could consider more carefully whether it’s a bargain or not. Companies would also have a much higher burden to give your property to the government. It’s your property, after all, not theirs. And companies would become more like banks (not that banks are the shining star of industry at the moment) in that banks have a contract to protect and return your money when you ask, though they can use your money/data to make money/data as long as they provide interest, dividends or similar in return.

To the extent that investment banks bet against the better interests of the economy they operate in, they broke the social contract. To the extent that Facebook poisons the well of trust about what can and can’t be shared online, they do no better than Goldman Sachs. Facebook doesn’t yet have a license to print money, run their loyalists into key White House roles, but give them enough time and they will.

Yes, in that not too distant speculative fiction future, we’ll all be required by law to have accounts, record our daily thoughts and activities, and our automated friend bots will tell everyone how much we love them.

* as always, my opinions are my own and not my employer’s.

Google just today announced it was suspending this data collection (not that my blog had anything to do with it). Google had previously and erroneously claimed they didn’t collect any wireless traffic, just SSIDs and MACs, but are stopping the entire practice (and intending to delete this data) just the same. This both shows good faith on the part of Google, but also highlights the dangers of unchecked data collection over personal privacy. It’s all too easy for mistakes and abuses to happen, even for well-intentioned companies in a hurry.

In the same original post in which they made the now-erroneous claim, they explained the geo-MAC-PC connection method I imagined (in my response to some ill-informed commenters not understanding how one might connect location to a user’s identity via MAC address). It’s basically this: when you click the "locate me" function, your local network can find the MAC address of your router, which Google (and Skyhook, Microsoft, and others) have previously cached with its geo location. Presto. Your location is known.

They also wrote this:

"However, we do not collect any information about householders, we cannot identify an individual from the location data Google collects via its Street View cars."

I believe this is true in a narrow sense but incomplete and thus misleading. Simply connecting these two datums gives your location, but could (opposite of cannot) yield your identity if you’ve used Google’s services or otherwise revealed it to them in association with your IP address (which would be the public IP of your router in most cases, visible to web servers during routine queries like HTTP GET). If Google remembered that connection (and why not, if they remember your search history?), they now have your likely home address and identity at the same time. Whether they actually do this or not is unclear to me, since they say they can’t do A but surely they could do B if they wanted to.

A less scrupulous company could collect this information without consent via many kinds of apps run on your local machine, such as a toolbar or desktop search accelerator and it might or might not be illegal, but certainly would be wrong.

The fact that they’re suspending this is good and should be commended. Outcry from German privacy advocates was a strong incentive, I expect. But Google I’m sure realizes that to be trusted shepherds of user data, they have to really treat the data as being owned by the users, subject to the user’s individual and collective wishes. I’ve seen some of Microsoft’s PII (personal identifying information) review policies and I expect they’re well designed to prevent exactly this sort of problem.

There’s plenty of profitable business to be done in a way that sacrifices no one’s civil rights.

Note: Google seems to also try to make clear that encrypted routers were not subject to this erroneous data collection, but I’m not clear from the wording whether that means they didn’t collect MAC addresses or just didn’t snoop on wireless data here.

Original:

It’s somewhat expected for Google to log my IP address and/or place a cookie when I use Google.com, even if I’m not logged in to my Google account (which I rarely do anymore for the sake of privacy).This "feature" can be revealed in their privacy policy, clickable at the bottom of every page. I can find out, via some clicks, that Google will keep this info (esp. if I’m logged in), correlated with whatever searches I do, for many months. If I use a mobile device with Google, their privacy policy clearly states that they might learn my location, and even my battery life.

But where in their privacy policy does it state that Google will collect the MAC address of my router when they casually drive by my house for Google StreetView?

That idea, if true, seems to fly in the face of their main privacy assertions:

1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
3. Make the collection of personal information transparent.
4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

How can any of the bold statements above be true if they don’t even reveal that it’s happening? It’s certainly not on the "maps" privacy page.

The reason they would collect this info, I’d expect, is so they can tell where you are when you use their site. Me asking them to find me is an opt-in sort of thing, presumably. But it’s a major cheat, hardly opt-in or even out, if they already know and simply wait to tell me until I ask.

That’s not cool. In fact, if I use encryption on my router, I am explicitly stating that I do not want any information from my home network recorded. The fact that the MAC address and SSID is still available is unfortunate, but not an invitation or permission for anyone to record or exploit this information.

If Google wants to catalog unencrypted routers, ones that are open for anyone to use, I’d personally have less of a problem with it. But what they are reportedly doing would seem to be a clear violation of their own policy and, if true, in my opinion^* would constitute an unacceptable and potentially illegal invasion of my private residence, akin to tapping my phone to discover my phone number and location by secret observation instead of asking me to simply opt-in to their program.

So, Google friends who may read this blog, is it true?

_{*my personal opinion. This blog is entirely unconnected to my employer or its opinions.}

The problem for Apple was that extremely cool packages like Unity3D and Adobe CS5 were poised to make it really easy for developers to write great apps in a safe clean sandbox and press a big orange button to deploy to iPhone.

This was formerly a very clever way around Apple’s previous requirement that all apps be native, as in rock solid compiled vs. flexibly interpreted/JITed like Flash and Silverlight. But Apple, clearly masochists the lot of them, wanted everyone else to use their circa-1980s-with-GUI-glued-on XCode development environment too. Or they just wanted to screw their whole ecosystem because they’re too arrogant to fail, right?

Well, unfortunately, that’s not really what’s going on here. Apple isn’t stupid. The problem with CS5 and Unity3D for Apply is that they are inherently cross-platform. The people inside Apple, I’m sure, don’t really care what you use to develop their apps as long as they make money (for Apple), sell more iPhones, iPads & iUnderwear, and the apps generally don’t suck (at least in aggregate).

But Apple does care when I write a game that runs as well or better on Android or WinMo7 or Netbook+Flash, with no added effort, and gives users a great set of choices, some of them free. For developers, this is exactly what we want — the most/cheapest outlets for our work. So Apple is forcing developers to choose. "You want our luscious money-printing (for a select few) platform, then we want 100% loyalty."

This is the same reason other companies, ahem, look for games that offer exclusives to their console. Do I like it? As a developer, of course not. As an employee, meh. Not my call. But it does work, more than it doesn’t, and helps build a brand instead of a commodity.

Where it fails, and where Apple is being stupid IMO (and only IMO) is when they no longer have the sexiest hardware or lion’s share of mindshare, which may be sooner than they think. When someone else has something more appealing, then Apple will be forced to help developers cross-develop onto Apple’s platform, as other companies do now for theirs, and as Apple once did for all sorts of creative apps like Adobe’s.

All of that said, I’m ditching my iPhone anyway — the only reason I got it was because there was nothing better at the time. I have no loyalty to brands, only people.

I totally agree. Apart from equal triangles, various equivalences, etc.., understanding the nature of sine and cosine is monumental.

As a teenager, I was so excited by this knowledge, I not only took one point and rotated it in a circle, I then took four points, each 90 degrees apart, connected them by lines, and rotated a square.

Then I said, what happens if you rotate that square 90 degrees into the screen and say clone it a few times? Cool. I can rotate a cube. And what happens if you take that cube and add some parallax, such that things far away move towards a vanishing point?

Pretty soon, basic trig lead me to reinvent 3D graphics, the painters algorithm for drawing polygons, and I was off. In fact, the only thing I was missing as a kid was linear algebra and the knowledge that you could actually make a living doing fun stuff like this. Had I known the latter part, I’d probably have become a game developer at an early age.

Originally:

Here’s prime example of technology without context. What happens when a kid brandishing a fake gun, shooting at enemies only he can see, goes out in public and gets shot by police?

The author of the study had a financial interest in his so called findings. No one could reproduce those findings, though at the behest of concerned parents, many tried. And by now everyone of any integrity has disavowed the entire episode.

By that I mean to say that Jenny McCarthy claims the whole thing is a well orchestrated plot against the good doctor Wakefield who promoted the original autism/vaccine link. Yes, every scientist working for peanuts in terms of public money has decided conspire to ruin the life of one innocent man who stood to make considerable money from his so-called discovery. Brilliant plan! (reminds me of one not-too-bright former co-worker of mine who claimed the whole global warming debate was a devious plot by scientists to make more money).

Is it possible to issue a class action lawsuit against people who cause mass public stupidity leading to demonstrable harm? In my mind, it’s not much different than the fire in a theater scenario, especially when there is no fire.

Apple’s new business plan may be to sue themselves for trademark infringement against the confusingly similar name iPod. Yes, it is pretty much a 4x iPhone/iPodTouch, leading me to wonder if the best name would have actually been the iQuad…

I have an iPhone for now, but I’ll wait a while for any tablet. The form factor isn’t quite right, and I really want a real [open] PC in my tablet, not an overgrown locked-down single-tasking phone. 1024×768 is just not going to cut it as an e-reader when every other display in my life is 1920 pixels or higher. I’m sure people who buy them will swear by the improved calendar and PIM software and maybe even think the e-reader function kicks ass if they squint enough, but that’s not enough to justify inserting a new device into my list of carryables.

I’ve said for a while that Apple is Microsoft’s informal external design arm. But this shows that people can learn both positive and negative lessons from Apple’s innovation.