"All pictures you transfer to Memoto’s cloud service are stored encrypted. The pictures are only visible to you: only you can see them and only you can change them."<p>Is this <i>real</i> client side encryption, or is it Dropbox/Hushmail style encryption where they can do a little server side trickery in order to obtain your encryption key if the US government compels them to?<p>I'm just thinking how useful it would be to law enforcement if they could just specify a location, date and time and go through pictures taken there for evidence.<p>I hate this whole idea. It's inevitable that it will happen, but I hate it nonetheless. You wont be able to go outdoors without being constantly recorded by strangers. My only hope is that the popular services manage the technology such that we don't end up with databases that governments, or organisations can read private data from.
The life recorder is inevitable. I mean full video and audio. I've been talking about it for decades. The social and psychological shift is going to be huge. Are you self conscious when somebody is following you around taking pictures ? This thing will bug everybody out. The first adopters will be security and police (who already do it with their car based video). Then narcissists and people who want to have their own vanity tv show 247. And annoying tech dudes who wear it at parties.<p>many people will realize how boring their lives look from the outside and they will stop wearing it because it's depressing.<p>Anyway, the tech isn't the hard problem, it's the analysis, information overload and personal search engine industry. Many companies including my own are skating towards that puck.
Wouldn't it be easier to modify something like the already incredibly cheap (~$10) available key chain cameras? There are already quite sophisticated discussions on these out there <a href="http://www.chucklohr.com/808/index.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.chucklohr.com/808/index.shtml</a>.
The good thing about being with someone is that : being with someone ALONE. Not someone analyzing what I did with my wife one month ago, where, how, why.<p>The idea is not new, Justin started <a href="http://www.justin.tv/" rel="nofollow">http://www.justin.tv/</a> recording everything in his life with a video camera.<p>I don't want anything I say or do being recorder by someone else(I know this camera only takes pictures, by now), and I don't want other people(smartphone manufacturer and the US government) to know what I did Thursday at 3:00 pm.<p>One of the worse things about living in a small village is all people controlling what others do, gossip here and there. In cities people were free of other people trying to control them, with cameras everywhere and web social services it is becoming rural village again.<p>It is big brother´s dream. In the future the government will use cameras on the street, face recognition and servers to track anybody at any time.
Depressing. This is like that movie with Robin Williams "The Final Cut". <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/</a> A total privacy nightmare. Your government is gonna love it though.
If anyone would like a lifelogging camera right now, you can purchase a Vicon Revue (rebadged/locked version of Microsoft's SenseCam):<p><a href="http://www.viconrevue.com/product.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.viconrevue.com/product.html</a><p>It has a "privacy button" that stops it from taking photos for a few minutes and records other information along with the images (like temperature, for example). Also, all of the images and data are stored locally on the device.<p>Another lifelogging camera, with better specs, about to hit the market (Nov 2012 according to the register/buy page) is Autographer, from the Oxford Metrics Group:<p><a href="http://www.autographer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.autographer.com/</a><p>They are advertising 8GB of internal storage, so it would seem that they're storing the images locally too, though the device has bluetooth.
Looks cool... but... Does this have a long-term future? Soon (I hope) we will all be wearing glasses with cameras in and I wonder whether that will render this obsolete?
It costs 249 bucks for the later batches and 199 dollars for the early version. Expensive. I guess I'll have to wait for product evolution to make stuff cheaper.<p>On the other hand, the application for lifelogging is pretty long. An employed programmer(or indeed, anybody who makes money) should be able to justify the expense of 249 bucks no problem.
2000 pictures per day doesn't sound like much (a bit more than 2 pictures on average per minute) but this <i>really</i> adds up even at the resolution of this camera, they claim about 1.5 TB / camera / year. Uploading and storing that much data for a large number of users in a reliable and cost effective manner is a non-trivial exercise.<p>So the big question is what their monthly fee is and I think this project should disclose those (projected) fees and not just the price of the device because it could very well be that those monthly fees will be the large component.
I'd rather see someone create <i>really, really disruptive technology</i> like a "personal privacy bubble" I can activate when I choose to. Something that will auto-blurr and auto-jam all video/audio. THAT is something people would like. "Want to film me? I opt out!"
As cool as this is, I'll be interested once we have always on audio, video and GPS, with-- while we're day dreaming-- a post-process that analyses the data and reduces it to a day summary complete with transcribed conversations, things you saw and people you met.
Hi all, sorry to come late to this thread. I'm one of the founders of Memoto and a long term HNer. FWIW, Memoto would never have reached this stage without HN.<p>Of course we are very happy about the results of the Kickstarter campaign. Personally I am also very happy about the healthy concerns raised here on HN, to continue to inspire us to never settle for mediocrity. We have a great team of engineers working on both hardware and software. It is a challenge to handle such a long tech chain but we feel it is manageable with the team we have.
This is an idea that probably rests on their software and ease of use capabilities, as small portable cameras have existed for quite some time now in the $10-20 price range: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Digital-Video-Novelty-Camera/dp/B006IFK5V0" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Digital-Video-Novelty-Camera/dp...</a> or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mini-30fps-chewing-shaped-camera/dp/B004Y3PH20" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Mini-30fps-chewing-shaped-camera/dp/B0...</a><p>The geotagging of events, plus all the wonderful image recognition and categorizing (plus automatically judging photos as interesting or valuable) are the selling point of this camera. It'd be pretty hard to get shots of yourself though, maybe they could introduce some sort of opt in feature where other users of this kind of camera that were in a close by position at similar times would contribute to your feed? (Or did I just invent Color?)
Just don't forget to turn it off on your vacation...<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/arma-iii-developers-charged-with-espionage-in-greece/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/arma-iii-developers-ch...</a>
“To recharge the camera’s batteries, you connect the camera to your computer; at the same time the photos are automatically uploaded to Memoto’s servers”<p>What? I can’t just keep the photos without putting them on Memoto’s servers ??
I don't get it. I'm not going to wear this to work, partly because my boss would think I was a spy and partly because my work life simply isn't worth recording at that level of detail.<p>So then I take it with me places on the weekends. But, I already take a high quality camera with me most-places (courtesy of my smart-phone) and it takes pictures at EXACTLY the right moment, it doesn't miss the shot because of a poor-angle, bad light, bad composition or bad timing. At least when it does, it's my fault.<p>To me this seems way too niche to ever succeed. I expect I'll be wearing one though in a few years time :-)
The cloud model would seem problematic for this
much data, given the bandwidth constraints of many users.<p>For my DSL connection (3Mbps/0.8Mbps) I would need to
saturate my outgoing bandwidth half of each day
to upload 4GB. And I think that these numbers aren't
far off from the global average.<p>If this is going to be a viable product, I don't
understand at why the developers wouldn't provide
a local storage model. Without that, I for one
would have zero interest in the service as described,
particularly given all the other concerns of handing
over this much intensely personal data.
Interesting idea. Except for this part: "the photos are automatically uploaded to Memoto’s server."<p>Are you kidding me? No option for just uploading to my own computer? This makes the whole thing a non-starter.
2000 geotagged pictures a day, every day of my life, automatically uploaded to their servers, and no word on how would one set up their own private server? Let me think about it... #not
I wish i was more qualified to identify the myriads of cliches in their video. Hipstery shaky 70s-ish looking nostalgic video, rounded edges, yellow plastic, heavy SLR.<p>But really, this seems like a cool idea for a phone app, why the extra hardware?
I think this is a really cool idea, but it's still about 2 or 3 times too big for me to wear it. It's big enough that people will notice it and ask about it, which is enough to discourage me from wanting one.
They would have to make batteries replaceable, since a product targeted to years of use.<p>Their funding goal of $50K is ridiculous. This is a software + hardware project. $50K is nothing.<p>Plus they need to pay royalties for using JPG once that project takes off.