
Lifelogging is dead for now - kurthamm
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3048497/personal-technology/lifelogging-is-dead-for-now.html
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modeless
There's a life log built into Google Maps. It's called Timeline and it's
pretty neat. It annotates your raw location history with the names of places
you've been and the photos you took while you were there. It's a nice benefit
for those of us who don't mind letting Google store our location history.

[https://www.google.com/maps/timeline](https://www.google.com/maps/timeline)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Yeah, I shut that trash off years ago. I love keeping records of my own. I
don't love the government having a permanent record of everywhere I've ever
been over the last ten years.

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tezza
Won't they have your phone mast history as a good second go ?

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ocdtrekkie
Cell phone location history won't tell you nearly as much. They can generally
say which town I'm in, what part of town even. But I could at any point be in
hundreds of different buildings at any point from the history of what towers
I'm connected to.

Meanwhile, Google location history pinpoints you to an exact address give or
take every five minutes.

~~~
tezza
They'll have much better accuracy than you think.

You're connected to one at a time but frequently checking for more appropriate
towers in case of signal outages.

Using this they could triangulate you quite precisely.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The question there is your use of "could". Is this something they can do if
they want to know about you specifically, or something they're already doing
(and storing) for all users?

The ability to decide to track down one person right now for criminal justice
purposes is not nearly as concerning as just being able to request anyone's
precise location history going back a decade.

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kybernetikos
I absolutely would like to record everything but I'm not prepared for all that
data to live in the cloud and belong to some untrustworthy tech giant.

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personjerry
What about a questionably trustworthy tech startup?

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kybernetikos
Theoretically yes. Practically I'd be very surprised if such a tech startup
would have terms I would trust. Things I'd be looking at:

* data ownership - including in the event the startup is bought

* data access revocation - I want to be able to revoke access to my data in a meaningful way

* business plan - I want to be the customer not the product for something like this

* portability - I don't want to feel that I'm stuck using any one solution for my life.

I really don't know if such a service can be made economically viable given
such a set of requirements.

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severine
Take a look Su Sandstorm.

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mcherm
What is that? I can't (easily) tell what it is that you are trying to suggest
looking at.

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swsieber
I think they mean Sandstorm.io

Sandstorm pretty much meets those requirements:

* Your data is exportable

* They focus on security and have a non-privacy-invading business plan

* You can decide exactly who to share data with, and revoke it.

It's like a private hosted cloud - you have to pay for it yourself (once it's
out of beta), but you could host it yourself, and it's open source.

[https://sandstorm.io](https://sandstorm.io)

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nerdponx
I'm genuinely surprised that so many people are interested in logging every
detail of their lives. It seems like the obsession with collecting memories on
your hard drive is a great way to never collect any of them in your head

~~~
CuriouslyC
If you are more concerned with taking pictures than being in the moment and
absorbing the gestalt of the experience, then yes. That being said, a
photographic log of particularly salient experiences can provide retrieval
cues down the line to help you re-live and re-enjoy them.

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mark_l_watson
My best Life Log is my pictures and videos taken with my phone, available both
in chronological order and somewhat organized into topic collections (Google
Photos only). I set my phone to wait until I am on wifi and then send copies
to Google Photos, Microsoft Onedrive, and Dropbox. (I delete a lot of pictures
soon after I take them if I don't want them in my permanent collection). I
have the same time ordered collection on one of my laptops and back everything
up occasionally to DVRs.

I use this time ordered photo stream a lot. When I am traveling, sitting in an
airport and don't feel like working at the moment, I like to jump back to some
point in time and look through the pictures for a few month interval.
Refreshes my memory and I enjoy remembering time with family and friends,
travel, etc.

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fsiefken
Every 2m a snapshot of my desktop gets taken through cron for personal review
later. Would be nice if I had a similar minimally socially invasive tool away
from my computer. Perhaps I can just use my memory for that.

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anentropic
what possible use could that have?

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SmellyGeekBoy
Could be a contractor billing by the hour. Plenty of people track their time
this way.

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hscells
This is actually the area of research for my honours thesis. Many of the
points made here are very valid - there is simply so much personal data being
generated and there is no way to access it in a meaningful way.

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lordnacho
One great thing about the current state of technology is you'll have a picture
of your kid virtually every week of their life.

When I was a kid, the camera would get lugged out for occasions like
birthdays.

Now I have more pictures of my kids than days in their lives.

I think it's great. There's even metadata to tell you where and when the pic
was taken.

~~~
raihansaputra
I think this increase of frequency is interesting too. But sometimes it does
dilute the meaning of the pictures, and no one have time to sort out 1000+
pictures from the last year to make into one coherent album telling a story.
They resort to 'auto-curate' that's based on their network's reaction to the
post (e.g. those 5 top posts of the year on instagram), not the moment or
their story itself.

~~~
lordnacho
Surely a job for machine learning? There's enough metadata to spin a short
narrative:

\- We went to Legoland when you turned 4, here's the pics of the day...

vs

\- Here's a toad we came across on the way home from school one day...

~~~
raihansaputra
sure it's probably easier for vacation/location based narrative (picks ones
that are far away from home). But maybe it can learn to pick more interesting
data too (first picture of your child standing up/first video of them
walking). Or last pictures of someone with you.. After thinking about it, yeah
it might be a job for machine learning.

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piva00
Lifelogging reminds me of this episode of Black Mirror:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You)

Now I don't know how much it was based on Gordon Bell's/Vannevar Bush's idea
or if it's simply a big coincidence.

~~~
soylentcola
Thought about this as well. I agree that the concept of using electronics to
create a sort of "prosthetic" photographic memory is interesting but going
with the theme of the series, it did an interesting job of dramatizing the
potential pitfalls of being able to rewind and review everything you say or
do. I liked that wasn't even about conspiracies or surveillance but rather the
way that sort of access to the past can allow you to dwell on it and
constantly second-guess yourself and past actions.

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berntb
I always wondered what would happen to violent crime if everyone logged what
happens? (If there is no obvious camera, it would be enough if 10-15% logged,
for the risk to increase.)

A button sends the last minute of everything that happened to the police,
along with GPS coordinates (preferably with a face recognition service)?

If your voice is needed to turn off logging, it will be obvious what happened,
when knock out drugs are used in bars.

And so on.

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pjc50
Selective enforcement goes through the ceiling, as there's suddenly far more
"crime" than anyone knows what to do with.

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berntb
Yes, but add face recognition and it will be easy court cases...

I see new services for the future:

\+ Upload services that gets video checksums every second (and maybe a picture
every 30 seconds), so you can prove that this video was not tampered with.

\+ Jamming equipment, so criminals can stop information from leaving the
victim (then destroy the logging hardware.)

\+ Cheap, fast flying drones that can leave a person being robbed, to send
video/audio/alarm to the police outside the previously mentioned jamming
radius.

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mark_l_watson
I think it is important to focus on Bell's motives: he wanted to augment his
physical memory with a digital record of his life.

There are other strategies that are manual and thus miss a lot of information,
but does it really matter? I use org-mode type shared files for notes, and
sometimes use of Google Keep and Evernote for research notes. I also toss all
PDF files for interesting conference papers, monthly ACM issues, eBooks I have
bought into a folder that is searchable on my laptop and I keep a copy on
Google Drive so I can find stuff if I don't have my own laptop with me.

It is a tradeoff: how much time to spend archiving potentially useful stuff
vs. the long term benefit of having this stuff available.

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bitJericho
Hard drives are so cheap why not DIY? The article implies TB of data but I
find that dubious.

~~~
fsiefken
Every 30s would amount to 2880 times * x Mbyte per day. Which would mean 2
Gbyte per day. If you have a movie at 12 FPS you could get it down to 12 Gbyte
per day.

~~~
bitJericho
I have a feeling 8 hours of pitch black video compresses to even less. So at
the lowest resolutions and framerates maybe you have 1gb of video per day.
That's around 2 and a half years per tb. You can buy 5 tb drives for under 300
dollars. That means you can do video for 14 years. With backups and all the
hardware, this entire project could cost less than 1000usd.

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Kiro
I don't know. [http://getnarrative.com/](http://getnarrative.com/) seems
pretty popular!

~~~
sheraz
They went through some rough times this summer (bankruptcy/re-org) [1] and
have secured some new funding [2].

Also interesting, because they are based in Sweden, you can get a look into
some of their financials as well[3].

Anyone from @narrative care to comment on this?

[1] - [http://blog.getnarrative.com/2016/07/narrative-initiates-
a-c...](http://blog.getnarrative.com/2016/07/narrative-initiates-a-company-
reorganization/)

[2] - [http://blog.getnarrative.com/2016/07/first-round-of-
funding-...](http://blog.getnarrative.com/2016/07/first-round-of-funding-
secured-for-narratives-company-reorganization/)

[3] -
[http://www.allabolag.se/5568709520/Narrative_AB](http://www.allabolag.se/5568709520/Narrative_AB)

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Jack000
Depends on your definition of lifelogging I guess, I would argue that most
lifelogging happens on Facebook now. Most people don't want to automatically
share every detail about their lives, they want to present a filtered,
sanitized version that serves as a personal narrative.

~~~
soylentcola
Yeah, definitely depends on definition. If you mean publishing/broadcasting,
then sure. That can and should be something you curate and choose what things
you want to share about yourself rather than an all-or-nothing situation.

But there's the possibility of using it as a sort of glorified journal as
well. As someone already mentioned that Black Mirror episode where this is
explored along with the pitfalls of living in the past or constant second-
guessing I'll skip that angle.

Still, in a more positive light, using tech to automatically journal some
things (places you've been, time spent doing various activities, things you've
seen, etc) at least has the potential to benefit. Maybe it's something as
simple as trying to remember a place your visited or maybe it's a real eye-
opener when you see just how much time you spend sitting in traffic. Either
way, there are definitely some potential uses that go beyond the
"liveblog/broadcast every second of your life" thing.

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OedipusRex
A few people in the early days of Justin.tv (now just known as Twitch) would
"LifeCast", one of the more popular broadcasters ended up working for Twitch.

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peterkelly
It's not dead; NSA have simply taken over the responsibility

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SwellJoe
Computer World still exists?

