bodily privacy

I apologize in advance to anyone who is paranoid about being watched.  If so, don't read the rest of this post.  I'm serious.  This is about a prediction I am making that might make some such people uncomfortable.

I had a shocking realization recently.  I certainly hope that I am wrong, but I think that at some point in the future there are going to be unclothed pictures of pretty much everyone stored somewhere publicly accessible.  This isn't because I think that everyone is going to be an exhibitionist in the future, but simply due to technological advancement.

As a minor, slightly unrelated example of how fast privacy is going away, a couple of weeks ago a picture of NJ showed up on my Facebook news feed, except it was not a picture of NJ.  It was a picture of one of my Facebook friends taken and posted by someone he knows and with whom I am not friends on Facebook.  He just happened to be in the same restaurant we were in earlier that day, and NJ was simply in the background of the picture.  Just think of all of the people in the background of the pictures you have taken.  You're probably in just as many picture backgrounds as well, so there is pretty strong documentation of most places that you have been in public if the faces in the pictures could be properly indexed and searched.  Usually, that is not a big deal, but in some situations it may be.

I have long suspected that privacy as we think of it will become infeasible to maintain at some point in the future.  It is also easy to see in social media that a lot of people are very comfortable exposing specific aspects of themselves that society has traditionally deemed private.  Most of my contemplation to this point has centered around the privacy of thought rather than bodily privacy, however it makes sense that if we lose one we will lose the other.  If there are cameras everywhere to catch conversations and facial expressions, there will be cameras everywhere to undo other sorts of privacy as well.  These cameras might catch things inadvertently or intentionally, but the result is still the same that privacy will be violated.

The one thing I can think of that might strike down my predictions is that I can also consider is that anti-filming or camera detection technology will advance at the same pace, and that businesses and governments that manage public restrooms and changing areas invest in those technologies.  This will means that individuals will have to be diligent, and the question is whether that level of diligence is realistic.

As an extra consequence of this prediction, I believe that any companies that currently hold patents on technology to detect and/or disable hidden cameras will probably make a killing in the not-so-horribly-distant future.  Well, at least that is my paranoid prediction.  Hopefully, I am wrong about all of this, or I am at least wrong about how far in the future this reality is.