DARPA Ditches Backup Brain Plans

Bleeding Edge

from the oh-well... dept

The concept of the “backup brain” – a device that you carry around that records everything going on around you for future use – has gotten a lot of attention over the past few years. Both Microsoft and Accenture announced plans to work on projects in the space, and no one really flipped out. However, as soon as the government suggested they were looking at a similar project, called LifeLog, people began to freak out about the privacy implications. I’m not entirely sure what the worry is. The project wasn’t designed to stream back all the data about your life to some government computer, but for the individual’s own use. Having dealt with bad publicity over other projects in the last year, however, DARPA seems a bit gun-shy on any controversial program, and thus are killing off their LifeLog project. I’m not sure what the big deal is on this, as it does seem like a worthwhile technology to explore, and research at Microsoft on their MyLifeBits and Accenture’s Personal Awareness Assistant (though, scaled back considerably) will continue.