Communications of the ACM
They See What You See
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Andrew Conway's and Peter Eckersley's Viewpoint "When Does Law Enforcement's Demand to Read Your Data Become a Demand to Read Your Mind?" (Sept. 2017) was an important contribution to the ongoing debate over electronic backdoors, whereby a backdoor is a means for accessing and exfiltrating user information not specifically authorized in advance by users. Here, I would like to outline several key aspects of that debate that also need to be addressed.
Although Conway and Eckersley did discuss the possibility that law enforcement could gain access to our most private thoughts, they did not mention a crucial near-term technology through which this exfiltration could happen. Within the next 10 years, "hologlasses," or holographic glasses, are projected by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung, along with numerous startups, to become almost as common as cellphones are today, as reflected in the scale of their investment in its development. A backdoor in hologlasses could enable a "we see and hear what you see and hear" capability that would provide extraordinary insight into what users are thinking, as well as how they are behaving online and even in the physical world.
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