VIEWPOINT 26 | IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2014 Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2319895 Date of publication: 4 June 2014 S ince prehistoric times, art and images have been created by humans and used not only to capture key aspects of our existence, but also to communicate those conditions and experi- ences to others. Examples range from documenting hunting methods in ancient cave paintings, to captur- ing the essence of God in sublime Renaissance works of art. Even today when we take in these images they shape our perception and understanding of the world. But the visual world is rapidly changing, or at least the human’s ability to produce images and the range and speed in which they circulate. World-wide media networks can now make a local event almost instantaneously global. Moreover, producing still and moving images is now no longer the domain of professionals or of amateur photog- raphers and filmmakers. Everyone with a smartphone can take an image and circulate it through numerous social networks. By 2017 there will be an estimated 5.2 million mobile users interacting in a world that offers ever more ways to receive and share information [1]. New technologies, including the Internet, have democratized the production and circulation of images. The new visual world offers an abundance of oppor- tunities for sharing and learning across political and cultural boundaries. But these advances in technology have also come at a certain cost. Anxieties abound. CCTV cameras now capture our every move around the clock. In the United King- dom conservative estimates put the number of CCTV cameras at almost 1.9 million, or one for every 32 citi- zens, resulting in major protests against the resulting infringement of privacy [2]. Drones circulate above us and numerous new mobile visual devices multiply the extent to which our lives are recorded: there are not only cameras in houses and cars, but also increasingly numerous wearable visual devices, from armbands and watches to glasses, all potentially recording everything, 24 hours a day. These recording devices are even more intrusive than CCTV cameras, for they are mobile and can record anything, anywhere, anytime, thus captur- ing people in potentially very compromising situations [3]. Some commentators speak of Überveillance, of a world in which omnipresent recording, sharing and data-gathering devices leave very little room for pri- vacy [4]. Consider how a woman wearing a new pro- totype version of Google Glass – a so-called optical head-mounted display (OHMD) – was attacked in San Francisco by a man who ripped off her glasses [5]. There are good reasons to worry about the spread of a surveillance society and what this does to both our individual freedom and our societal interactions. But some of these worries are founded on a misplaced notion that images somehow produce evidence that is authentic, or at least more authentic than words. Why, for instance, was there no comparable outcry at the emergence of mobile tape-recorders? They ROLAND BLEIKER Authenticity and Deception in an Age of Visual Wearables Fig. 1. Croatian Parliament president Marko Došen, in 1994, giving Nazi salute (far left), accompanied by Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (far right) and other Catholic Church leaders. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/PUBLIC DOMAIN.