flipthepyramid
Wired Magazine Feb 4th, 2004
THE PENTAGON CANCELED its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.
Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.
LifeLog’s backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians immediately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, arguing that LifeLog could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state.
Remember TheFacebook.com?
When TheFacebook launched on this day, Feb. 4, in 2004, it was for a limited audience and offered limited capabilities — and, the first time the site showed up in TIME, the writer had an appropriately limited amount to say about it.
Corbetreport.com did a very good piece on Lifelong/Facebook.
Thank you both for sharing these.
I didn’t know all of the history behind this.
Do either of you know what happened to Meta?
I thought it was supposed to be Zuckerberg’s next phase for his surveillance platform, but it seemed to be hyped up for awhile only to fizzle to nothing.
What was that about?
There is a typo, should be: corbettreport.com
That is interesting. Never knew about LifeLog. I guess they abandoned it when some autistic jewsish kid at Harvard had already stolen the idea and had something cooking.