It’s actually a lot like the stuff Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury was working on when I interviewed her for a Technology Review video back in 2008. In fact, when I first read about the Fitbit (thanks to friend-of-Candleblog, Robot Kasten), I assumed it monitored other sorts of telemetry too, like your heart-rate, skin temperature, the local barometric pressure, etc. As Dr. Choudhury showed me, with those additional data points and some clever software, you can learn all sorts of fascinating stuff about how you’re living your life day-to-day.

The implications for this sort of technology are pretty amazing. Yes, it can encourage us (through a combination of social-networked peer pressure and sheer geeky awesomeness) to live healthier lives, but it can also keep us honest with our doctors when they ask us how active we’ve been since our last visit. It can tell us other unintended interesting things, like how often we have sex and for how long. I can imagine Fitbit data being subpenaed in legal cases involving violent crimes or even car accidents. And this is just one data set involving an accelerometer. Imagine what these things will be like with microphones and video cameras gathering data and generating reports about our activities. Now imagine all that data searchable via an engine like Google (searchable by you — nobody is forcing you to publish this data, though there is a privacy can of worms here too, obviously) — how useful would that be?

What did I eat for dinner last week? click. What was that book the guy at the coffee shop recommended a few days ago? click. What was it my boss wanted me to do again? click. How many calories did I consume in 2012 compared to 2011? click. How many times did I ride the elevator last month vs. taking the stairs? click. What percentage of my life is spent sitting in front of a screen? I dare not click.

When we look back at the lives of our parents and grandparents, we see them through photographs, letters, maybe some home movies if we’re lucky. From here on out, the definition of what we mean by “history” changes. Future generations will have more data about the lives of their progenitors than they will know what to do with. What will your data stream say about you?

It turns out that Vermont is front and center for some of the more fascinating Constitutional legal questions currently being discussed. Sexting, border crossings and laptop seizures, Al Jazeera-English on Burlington Telecom cable TV, Burton snowboards featuring “indecent” art — these have all been specific issues here in Vermont, though not all of them have invoked actual litigation.

I’ve edited and uploaded the entire conference onto the Vermont ACLU’s blip.tv channel. It’s in seven parts and each part is labeled with the specific issue that’s discussed. I’m embedding my personal favorite segment here. It’s Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the National ACLU in NYC, talking about privacy and free speech issues surrounding global, instant, digital communications tools. It’s worth your time…

If you’re reading this post on Monday June 29 between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., click here to view the live stream. The Burlington Free Press ran a story on the conference on the front page today. Read it here.

The implications of this are awesome. The future of live video is bright.

According to the LATimes, Lancaster is about to embark on a project installing 165 closed-circuit TV cameras in all of the city’s public spaces. That’s probably the highest number of CCTV cameras per capita in the U.S. and according to the Times, it’s actually more cameras in terms of raw numbers than are present in big cities like San Francisco and Boston.

This news by itself is enough to engender all sorts of hand-wringing over privacy and security issues and living-in-fear-of-Big-Brother scenarios, but what’s really interesting about the Lancaster story is that the budget-strapped city is relying on an all-volunteer army of Big Brothers (and, one presumes, Big Sisters) — citizen vigilantes who will take turns monitoring all of the public cameras.

Knowing how tough it is to find volunteers to bag groceries at the local food co-op, I wonder about the practicality of finding enough volunteers to monitor 165 different video feeds 24/7 — video feeds that will certainly be astoundingly boring to look at the vast majority of the time — but assuming this crowd-sourcing plan works, it certainly raises some interesting questions…

• Since there is no direct government oversight over the monitoring operation, does that mean that Constitutional privacy issues are rendered moot?
• How will the town deal with the potential of abuse — nosy neighbors and stalker boyfriends using the video feeds as ammunition for their personal curiosity?
• Isn’t this actually more egalitarian than having only government officials monitor the feeds? After all, if constant electronic surveillance is a given going forward (and I think it’s reasonable to argue that will eventually be the case), isn’t it better if everyone has access to the data rather than just an elite class of Watchers? If we can spy on Big Brother while he’s watching us, doesn’t that take some of the sting out of the surveillance society?

If privacy is really going away, I for one prefer an open source type of surveillance program to a police state. I’m not suggesting that Lancaster is onto something brilliant — I think the city is reacting out of fear and not thinking through all of the implications of their plan — but I also think the knee-jerk negative reactions to this story should be carefully reconsidered from an if-not-this-then-what perspective. If you think the answer is simply to protect the privacy of citizens from all electronic surveillance, then I say good luck with that plan, Sisyphus Q. Luddite! Let us know how that works out for you.

[This post ws crossposted at The Contrarian]