Luke Tipping writes:

Lots of talks today and the big theme uniting them was privacy. First up was Julian Assange. Teleported in by Skype from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Julian talked about how there’s been a militarisation of our civilian space. He suggests that our information is being stolen from us every day by governments and brands. It is now almost impossible to live outside of surveillance. In the next hour, how about trying to live without a digital sensor of sorts recording any of your behaviour?

Later in the day Jon Lebkowsky and Patrick Lichty talked about the "Cyborg Gaze". They suggested that pervasive imaging is now everywhere and that there’s a shift occurring from surveillance to "sousveillance". This is defined as the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity. It is done typically by way of a small wearable device like Google Glass.

A Cyborg turned up to the Q&A:

Lebkowsky and Lichty suggested that today a participatory panopticon is occurring, wherein we increasingly have no idea whether we are being watched or not. Nor do we know whether somebody elsewhere is copying the photos and videos we take and analysing them for another purpose.

Why does it matter if we’re being watched? If we’re good people with nothing to hide then it doesn’t really matter, right?

Maybe. Although for me the real issue boils down to the fact that machine vision has better memory than human. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger talks a bit about this in his fantastic book Delete. He says that once upon a time it was hard to remember. Now it’s almost impossible to forget.

As humans it's really important that we’re able to grow and escape our former selves. Think about some of the things you may have said on the playground when you were younger. Part of growing up is about making mistakes and learning. How can we do that if increasingly our every word and move is being recorded, potentially appearing later in life in a completely different context. If you’d like your daughter or son to be a future Prime Minister or President it’s probably worth making sure they never use a social network. Or maybe get them started on Secret first. Here's what everybody here is secretly thinking about SXSW by the way.

So quite a dystopian day, really. A lot of the stuff we build in technology is progressive but I really do believe that we don’t think properly about the social implications. The creative industries are increasingly embracing new and quick 'do then learn' iterative processes but perhaps we should all be a bit more thoughtful about what we’re making.

The privacy backlash is certainly making its way from governments towards brands. So if you’re using data to create a personalised product or service it's now more important than ever that you make the return of information disproportionately big enough for people.  

More tomorrow.