I got disappointed after trying YouTube on LG Smart TV. It’s slow to start, until now I don’t see that there exist a method to sort videos by date and it does not support Arabic. I hope that LG is going to address these issues soon and release a firmware upgrade for the existing models. On the plus, watching HD videos is excellent, welcome a new model of TV on demand.
A presentation I have delivered at University of Bahrain on December 2011.
It seems that we are closely approaching a time in which we will be able to capture a photo of almost anyone who has one type or another of presence on the web and automatically identify his/her identity. With the proliferation of profiles on social networks such as facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace and the advancement in facial recognition algorithms, it will be possible to take a picture of anyone and mine for information about that person on social networks.
Such a “service” will not be limited for personal purposes but also for other security and intelligence related purposes. Say, you are in the airport and presenting a passport with your photo, the airport system can search your face in social networks and media in addition to traditional media sites on the web to find out if you are likely to be who you claim you are.
What used to be very private information even in the so called conservative societies is becoming more publicly available on the web. Soon, it will be the case that a person who does not have an online presence will be dimmed to be tagged as “backward”. We are in a dilemma now and need to redefine what information is private. Personal, cultural and contextual factors will still help us in defining our private information, but the main driver will be the emerging and dynamic global culture.
Social network privacy options are evolving and soon we might have an option on facebook or LinkedIn to avoid making our faces searchable but who will stop Google from extracting facial information from our images that are posted by others?
If you are an active blogger, heavy email user and addicted to instant messaging and spend more time typing on the keyboard than talking, then I think Microsoft and Google could know more about some aspects of your personality than your wife. Techniques in data and text mining can find trends in your behavior and interpret your personality better than your wife. Simply because these systems have more data than her and can be more objective!
After few years, most people will increase their reliance on the web and use it for many day-to-day routines. I hope that they will analyse the behavior of successful people and give us a model of success that is compiled automatically. Equally, tell us if anyone is lying about his or others history. It is an infringement of privacy. But what after a person is dead by several years or by the request of an official agency!!
