Technology like facial recognition is taking our privacy issues that originated online and bringing them to the real world. Applying facial recognition technology to Facebook to identify us in photos is one thing, but revealing our identities every time we pass a camera is a whole other level of creepy.

The line between the virtual world and the physical world has been blurring for quite some time, but more recently the line has close to disappeared.

Technology like augmented reality lets us change the way the world around us looks. What makes me worry is thinking about how technology is influencing and changing the way we behave and interact with the world around us.

Privacy Is Always Approaching Zero

In 1999 the chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems — Scott McNealy — said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

What is so ironic about that claim is even if he believed at the time that his privacy was already totally gone, the information about a single person that businesses and government agencies can access has expanded far beyond where it was in 1999.

That’s why people are constantly concerned with privacy: There is always more privacy that can be taken away.