Total Recall: Mini-Camera Records All (and Perhaps Too Much)

The gadget could threaten privacy on both sides of the lens, critics warn.

ByABC News
May 3, 2013, 1:58 PM

May 4, 2013— -- Swedish company Memoto is developing a camera that automatically documents the lives of users by snapping a photo every 30 seconds. The gadget could threaten privacy on both sides of the lens, critics warn.

When they don't happen to be gazing at their computer screens or their iPhones, employees of the Swedish company Memoto can see the Stortorget, the famous square in the old section of Stockholm, from their office windows. The building that houses the Swedish Academy is on Stortorget square, where officials deliberate each year on who should be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, established by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.

The location has symbolic significance. Memoto also handles something that is explosive, figuratively at least, and Memoto also wants to explore how stories are told today. The startup company, launched in 2012, has 17 full-time employees from Sweden, Singapore and the United States. It is currently in the process of changing memory and how we see ourselves by focusing on how people remember things and what they remember, regardless of whether something as old-fashioned as privacy will even exist in the future. According to Memoto founder Martin Källström, who is not a writer but a software developer, the company's goal is to "find a way to re-experience our lives in the future while enjoying the present."

Källström, 37, invites us into the office kitchen for a product demonstration. Like his employees, he doesn't wear shoes in the office, just socks. His friend Oskar Kalmaru, 29, in charge of marketing, places a white cardboard box on the table. Its similarity to the packaging of Apple products is intentional. Källström opens the lid to reveal a prototype of the invention with which Memoto hopes to take the world by storm: It's a camera, but it doesn't look like one, even at a second glance. It's as tiny as a matchbox or an iPod nano.

The Memoto camera can be clipped to your clothing or worn on a chain around your neck. There is no shutter release, no display and no on-off button. The camera simply takes a picture automatically every 30 seconds, which comes to 120 pictures an hour or 2,880 a day. To stop the camera, you have to put it in your pocket. For each photo, the device stores the time and the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. The result is a giant photo diary, or "Lifelog," a term coined by the web community.

Naturally, the images don't remain in the camera. The Memoto app transfers them to the company's server or, more precisely, to a server Memoto rents from Amazon in the United States to store its customers' data.

The Memoto software sorts the photos, organizes them by subject and time, and highlights the best ones from a technical standpoint. The user can then use his or her own computer or smartphone to look at current pictures, search for old ones or post images to a social-networking site, such as Facebook.

These features make Memoto the ideal toy for people who have made online self-expression their mission in life. If the idea takes hold, there will be no events in the future that don't exist in image form. Forgetting will become a thing of the past, and we will no longer be able to sugarcoat our past experiences. Memory will no longer be subjective, but merely an image file on an Amazon server.