Ovid speaks of the Roman games as a place were people go to see, and be seen. There seems to be a very human tendency to want to know about others, and also to present a public presence.

But that tendency has been confined to specific social settings, where one would be primed, and where the extent of what one could find out about someone is limited by the knowledge or speculation of one’s informants.

Matthew Buckland thinks thats about to change, through augmented reality technology:
“You’d be able to hold up your phone in a crowded room and work out who is connected to who. You could instantly guage your primary and secondary networks and work out instantly who you should chat to, what the conversation points are — and who you should avoid. Where are the cliques. Whose an outsider? What’s the buzz. We’ll never forget a name again.”

Matthew’s written a fascinating blogpost The future of social networking – a concept investigation with some interesting mockups of what AR tech might look like.

Privacy concerns seem to arise on two levles, on the one hand the social games that people play, making judgements about other people, finding out about them, and managing the knowledge others have about your will be a lot more complicated. Will every lie become like that of a movie star or politician in which managing one’s public persona, the information one gives out, the information one conceal, the spin one puts on the past become a pre-occupation?

It seems that the privacy concerns raised in that context are best resolved though changing social norms. There is another, far interesting category, the stranger who starts talking to you and although you’ve never met him he seems to know you, who turns out to be a pushy salesman. That category seems to require the crudity of regulation, criminalising the intrusion in manner of the anti-spam regulation we never got.

The Protection of Personal Information Bill has recently been introduced into Parliament but as always law lags technology.