Did he just wink at me, or was he turning on the tiny cameras embedded in his contact lenses?

You may soon have reason to wonder. Sony and Google are developing contact lens cameras that can take photos and, possibly, video, with the blink of an eye.

Technology is rushing that way. Snap has already introduced sunglasses that record 10-second video clips and send them to Snapchat, which plays 10 billion videos a day.

Welcome to the the runaway converge of cameras, social media, and platforms that range from a person’s eyes, skin and clothing, to toothbrushes, jewelry, shirt buttons, soda cans teddy bears.


The U.S. has become a “shoot and share” society that’s flooding social media with content that’s alternately sublime, endearing, trivial, violent, and an assault on privacy and civility.

Snap, Inc. has introduced Spectacles, sunglasses that can record 10-second videos and send them to Snapchat (Snap, Inc.)

Analysts estimate that the public views at least 8 billion videos a day on Facebook, and almost 5 billion on YouTube. Instagram users share about 80 million photos a day.


It would take a person centuries to view just the videos currently available on Facebook.

“Americans feel a compulsion to share the nuances of their lives, especially if it makes them look good,” said Darin Andersen, founder of CyberTECH, a San Diego-based security company.

“And more of it is happening live on social media, which means that a lot of bad things leak out before they can be edited. It feels like everybody’s capturing images, and everybody’s watching.

“We’re digital voyeurs.”


UFC fans in Las Vegas take photos with their camera phones during weigh ins for UFC 207 in December 2016. (Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today Sports)

And we’re very conflicted about it.

A 2016 survey led by the Newmark Foundation says that about 80 percent of Americans over the age of 18 use social media on a daily basis. But 95 percent of them have little or no confidence that social networking companies will protect the privacy of their data.

That’s not enough to stop them from going online, where the range of fare spans human experience.


The New York Times recently tickled the masses with a 16-minute video showing ordinary people deciding whether to leap off a 10-meter diving platform. It surfaced not long after four men near Chicago inexplicably used Facebook Live to broadcast themselves beating a mentally disabled person. All four were soon arrested.

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg says that he won’t be surprised if most of the site’s content is soon is made up of video.

You’ll find a similar line of thinking in “Chasing Shadows,” a new anthology of stories and essays that explore how the digital world is likely to evolve, and how it will impact privacy and culture.

The book was edited by David Brin, an award-winning Carlsbad author and futurist who says in a closing essay, “Cameras will keep getting cheaper, smaller, better, more mobile and more numerous — each year — at a rate much faster than Moore’s law.


Carlsbad author-futurist David Brin (Nelvin C. Cepeda / U-T SAN DIEGO)

“Soon they will be too small to detect — concealed in that woman’s earring, or that fellow’s shirt button. Then on the corner of every cheap pair of sunglasses.”

Such technology is already emerging.

Last year, Snap, Inc. introduced Spectacles, sunglasses that can record 10-second bursts of video and send them to Snapchat, a mobile app that gets about 10 billion video views per day.


“Specs make memories, from your perspective,” says the product’s advertising copy.

The sunglasses emit a light that’s meant to let people know they’re being recorded. But that didn’t allay the privacy concerns of tech writer David Papp, who said in a review: “The possibility does exist that people will use them in inappropriate ways. Embarrassing clips could go viral. If users wear them in public washrooms or capture stealth videos of careless remarks, there is the possibility of abuse.”

Other devices could prove to be even less identifiable.

The San Diego startup MiP.O.V. Technologies is developing a wearable camera that is so small many people won’t notice it. And that’s the goal.


“We want people to capture authentic moments, not ones where you feel like you have to act in a certain ways in order to get a lot of ‘likes’ “, said Nick Phillips, the company’s chief executive officer.

“In 10 years, people will be asking, ‘Why didn’t we take even more photos?’ There were so many interesting things going on.”

The public may have other questions as well. Questions like: Will this little camera capture bystanders who don’t want to be in the picture? How will you protect their privacy?

Sony may push the field even further. Last year, the company filed a patent for a contact lens camera that could wirelessly send photos to digital devices, including tablets and smartphones. The user would snap a picture by blinking his or her eye in a certain way.


The next step might be live broadcasts to places like Facebook and Instagram and to YouTube, where users upload 300 hours of video every hour.

That would make the technology basically the same as the contact lens camera in “Eyejacked,” one of the short stories that appears in the Brin’s anthology, “Chasing Shadows.”

This “near future” science fiction story centers on Alicia, who uses the eyewear to live broadcast most of what happens in her life. She’s a “lilo,” which is shorthand for life logger.

Alicia is obsessed with becoming well-known. So when her young daughter nearly dies from an allergic reaction to peanuts, Alicia shows the incident, instantly attracting the attention of viewers from around the world.


The previous day, Alicia told her husband Patrick, “Honestly, the way to get into the high rankings (of lilos) is to have some kind of personal tragedy.”

“Eyejacked” is a cautionary tale from David Walton, a Philadelphia-based author who told The San Diego Union-Tribune, “Some people are infatuated with their lives and want to put it out there. I’d never do something like this. My life would no longer feel real. I’d be aware that people were watching me. I would behave differently.”

A lot of writers are feeling angst about the convergence of cameras and the online world, including Dave Eggers, who wrote “The Circle,” a top-selling sci-fi novel that will be released as a movie in April.

Tom Hanks stars in the movie version of the book, “The Circle.” The film debuts in April. (Frank Masi /STX Entertainment)


The book’s title refers to the name of a powerful tech company that pushes people to share every bit of information about themselves to promote honesty and good morals. The company also develops small, high-definition cameras that are broadly used to watch people, ostensibly for the benefit of the public. Supporters of The Circle do a lot of sloganeering, saying things like “secrets are lies” and “privacy is theft” and “All that happens must be known.”

The storyline has a lot of similarities to George Orwell’s book, “1984”, the tale of an oppressed society that’s forever being watched by “Big Brother.”

Brin says there are good reasons to believe that life as we now know will not devolve into “1984” or “The Circle” as the public becomes more comfortable with sharing their lives through social media. He notes that court rulings have clearly established that, with some exceptions, the public is entitled to record the public activity of police officers.

The issued was raised, in part, by the public’s growing use of mobile phones to monitor police during acts of violence.


But the evolution of cameras and other devices still causes Brin plenty of unease.

His essay says, “Is it the dawn of Big Brother? Either the old-fashioned kind — top-down oppression by all-seeing elites? Or else something equally scary but more lateral: scrutiny by a billion nosy neighbors and judgmental ‘little brothers’ “?

Darin Andersen also has given the matter a lot of thought.

“I don’t think things will turn out to be Orwellian,” Andersen said. “Look at the police. Many of them now wear body cameras. But the public has cellphones and they use them to take video of law enforcement.


“The watched are watching back.”

WELCOME TO THE CONVERGENCE

The evolution of cameras, mobile phones, websites and social media have made it easy for people to post photos and videos online. Here’s a sample of the things that happened that made that led to the convergence.

1965: Kodak introduces low-cost, easy-to-use instamatic cameras, causing a boom in photography.


1969: Engineers creates the first four nodes of the Internet, giving the project momentum.

1971: The first email is sent via networked computers, signaling a new way to share information.

1973: Motorola makes the first mobile telephone call, pushing the technology forward.

1975: Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft, whose software revolutionized how people communicate.


1976: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne found Apple Computers, which also revolutionized how people communicate, especially with photos, videos and graphics

1983: Steve Case and colleagues found Control Video Corp., the forerunner of AOL, which helped introduce the Internet to the masses.

1991: The World Wide Web is opened to the public.

1994: The first cellphone is introduced into the U.S. market; Jerry Yang and David File founded Yahoo!, which helps popularize the online world.


1996: Email surpasses “snail mail” in popularity.

1996: Nokia releases the first cellphone with Internet capabilities.

1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google, whose websites and software transform how people search for information and share it.

2000: Japan introduce the first cellphone camera,


2003: Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe found MySpace, a portal that helped popularize and diversify the online world.

2004: Mark Zuckerberg and a group of friends found Facebook, a company that greatly expands people’s ability to share video and photos.

2005: Chad Hurley and his colleagues and found YouTube, which becomes a huge global portal for video.

2005: Tech companies make big push in developing, marketing cellphone cameras


2006: Evan Williams and colleagues found Twitter, a messaging service that also becomes a huge distributor of photos and video.

2007: Apple introduces the iPhone, a device that that makes the distribution of images and photos easier and faster.

2008: T-Mobile introduces the Android smartphone, which also greatly improves the distribution of images and video.

2010: Apple introduces the iPad, a tablet that became a popular device for consuming and creating social media.


2010: Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger found Instagram, a mobile app that helps expand the sharing of images and video.

2012: Google launches Google Glass, a device that illustrates how glasses might be used to take and distribute images and video.

2015: Kayvon Beykpour and colleagues found Periscope, a mobile app that greatly improves live streaming online.

2016: Snap, Inc. introduces Spectacles, sunglasses that can record short bursts of video and send them to Snapchat.


2016: Sony files a patent for a contact lens camera

Sources: Internet Hall of Fame, Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, IEEE, Snap, Inc., Instagram, Internet Society, Apple, Kodak



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gary.robbins@sduniontribune.com