The following is an edited transcript of an interview with William Hurley of Chaotic Moon Studios in Austin. Hurley, also known as Whurley in the industry, and his team are harnessing the power of emerging technologies and making them accessible on your cell phone. In this interview, he spoke about the privacy issues associated with the technology. Click here to listen to the interview (wav file).

WEB EXCLUSIVE: I'm excited about better phone-to-phone connectivity where you can actually tell things about people. If you've seen the MIT SixthSense demo, it's very interesting. It uses a projector. It's very small, and it projects the data about you onto you while the person's looking at you. I think that getting a little bit better technology and being able to identify who you are and not just that you're in an area is going to open up a whole new world of possibilities. (Article continues after video.)

As an engineer, as a designer of these apps, our creative team is the people who come up with some of these very innovative ideas. We often have to stop to think about the implications of how those are going to work.

The Internet is the thing that's often criticized the most. The Internet and email weren’t built to fight spam, and it wasn't built to fight security issues because when it was the ARPANET nobody thought there was going to be any issues. There were 16 people on it, and they all knew each other so it wasn't a problem.

When you look at situations with augmented reality, I think that the first phase of it will be people realizing there's more information out there about them and everybody they know. It's not that the information isn't already there; it's just that there has never been such a simple way to expose it.

If you think about it, people, especially those in this country, seem to have an illusion of privacy, and they don't understand how much data is out there about them. When they swipe their credit card, that information is out there. When they apply for their driver's license or rent an apartment or buy a house, [that information is out there]. There will be companies who take this data and information, and they'll be able to use augmented reality to present it to some view.

The political apps are a good example with canvassing. I spoke to Congress recently and did a segment on C-Span about augmented reality, and the focus was on political apps. Every single political party and political party representative wanted an app for canvassing. They wanted to be able to go down your street and look through their smart phone and say Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, so on and so forth. There are a lot of people who wouldn't appreciate that information being shared.

So do I care that someone can look up and find that I'm a registered voter? Maybe, maybe not. Do I care that they can look up and find that I'm a registered voter when they're standing ten feet in front of my house? Maybe that makes an impact. I think there will be people that are appalled.

Google Street View is another great example. With Google Street View, there are hundreds of people who say, “You can't have a picture of my house.” Depending on where you are at, there are different laws governing that. But in a lot of cases, [Google] actually can. There's what's called privacy and people don't understand the difference between privacy and security or how they relate.

Also, I also think augmented reality will help start real relationships... though it might actually be a detriment.

Think of how Facebook works in most relationships. Psychologists have done a ton of studies. We actually had our chief interaction officer do one as well, and he find out that jealously happens much faster when you have a Facebook account. Somebody posts something to your page, and your significant other is like, “Well, who is that person?” or “Why did they post that?” And it's usually taken out of context 90 percent of the time.

Now imagine if you were out with your significant other in a bar and somebody talked to them, and then you held [up an app], and it was like, “They're friends on Facebook, and they used to date.” I don't know if it will be helpful or if it will be detrimental, but I think this is a whole new realm that we're getting into about sharing information.

We recently hosted the augmented reality event in California, and one of the keynote speakers we invited was a friend of ours, Will Wright. He did the Sims and Spore and he gave a really interesting viewpoint that was countered by a guy named Jesse Schell, who said in his presentation, “Augmented reality is technology we are all striving for, but we're doing it without really thinking of all of the implications.”

It’s a double-edged sword that we, as technologists, need to be very cognizant of as we're trying to create these new and innovative applications.