[liber8]

I'm not sure why I haven't seen this addressed yet, but doesn't the widespread use of something like Glass portend the dramatic fall of the prevalence of street crime? Widespread use of CCTV cameras are one thing, but millions of eye-level recording devices (presumably automatically beamed to the cloud at some point), would seem to me to be a major deterrent to all sorts of street crime.

I can see this effecting not just things like person on person crime (muggings, rape, battery, etc.) but also burglaries, arson, or any other crime that requires a getaway. Police or citizens could issues statements like "We had a break-in at 9:30 at 555 Main Street. If you were in a 5 block radius of that address, click here to upload your video feed from 9:00 to 10:00."

Obviously this also has terrifying privacy concerns as well, but the extent to which this could completely transform society seems to be undersold here, doesn't it?

[oinksoft]

It's awful. For ages, we've worried about The Government mounting cameras everywhere until the only private space was one's own home, and away from windows at that. 1984 famously envisioned a world where this surveillance extended to the domicile, but even then it was stationary and had blind spots.

Seems that in the near future, there will be little need for any of this, and there will be no coercion; rather, most of us will vie for the most powerful, feature-loaded head-mounted camera.

That's not to say that such an invention can or will only be used for evil. But there's no denying that this is huge progress for anybody dreaming of global surveillance or something like it.

[randallsquared]

Most of the evil that was thought to come from universal recording was because of the centralized nature of the recording. Widespread public feeds do not have the same inhibiting effect on desirable behavior, but might well have that inhibiting effect on undesirable behavior (where global society increasingly defines what "undesirable" means). Universal sousveillance is the best of both worlds! David Brin called this one early.

[tjoff]

Just like you really don't have any control over anything related to your smartphone today you won't have control over your glasses...

The only difference is that google will be the central hub, not your government. And rest assured that the government will have access to it as well. So...

[dman]

Being a dissident becomes harder with every passing day.

[dataminer]

Getting your ideas out is getting much easier.

[throa8923489]

Reminds me of this talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk by moxie. We thought we would get facism, instead we got social democracy.

We will be able to deal with this, though, using appropriate laws. Europe will certainly go down that route, the US will probably follow. For example, using the camera to take pictures or videos that are stored or shared (vs. just processed by some augmented reality algorithms) could enable a small lamp on the frame of the glasses. Just like a video recorder, but without the ability to (easily!) turn it off.

[randallsquared]

> We will be able to deal with this, though, using appropriate laws.

Ah, yes, in the same way that we've dealt with music piracy through law.

More seriously, people are going to have to get over the feeling that recording an event with human memory is obviously acceptable while recording an event with higher-fidelity devices is obviously not. Especially given that recordings can be faked, there is no dividing line between these. If you don't want people to remember something, don't let them know in the first place. Trying to regulate people's memory, whether internal or external, seems like a terrible idea.

[ryusage]

> Especially given that recordings can be faked, there is no dividing line between these.

How many of the people you know have ever created a video that seems completely true but is actually doctored? I'm a software developer, reasonably comfortable with technology, but I wouldn't know how, and I'm not even sure if I know anyone I could ask to do it. Certainly not without a fair amount of expense. Contrast that with verbal accounts of "internal memory": even a three year old is perfectly capable of lying, about pretty much anything.

So, if you tell or show someone something privately, you at least have the fallback of denying it if they go and share it against your wishes. If they record it, then in almost all cases people will take it as fact and there's nothing you can do. Not only that, but then they can actually show other people rather than just telling them. For many things, that's a much bigger deal.

[thedufer]

> using the camera to take pictures or videos that are stored or shared could enable a small lamp on the frame of the glasses

> you can see a light in the prism when the device is recording

This appears to already be true of Glass, although recognition of what that light means won't be widespread until the devices are.

[isaacwaller]

I disagree that the technology is currently dangerous as very few people would opt to allow the government to view their video feed. It is as you say - something right out of 1984 - and most people would recognize that and not give permission.

Unless the video is uploaded without the user's knowledge, I think we do not have to worry about government usage of these cameras.

[yusefnapora]

They wouldn't need to give permission to the government. "Get Glass today with 1TB free cloud storage. Access your precious memories from your phone, tablet or television!" Once it's in Google's cloud it's just a subpoena away.

[tjoff]

Opt to allow?! What planet are you from?

[yakiv]

It's like Facebook.

[dev1n]

And how wonderful that will be.

[jere]

Ask Darien Long, the "badass mall cop." He works in an area in downtown Atlanta infested with drug dealers and he constantly encounters people who want to threaten him. He has said repeatedly that his two most important weapons are his taser and his chest mounted GoPro camera, even though he carries an assortment of weapons that would make Batman jealous.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04/darien-long-mall-co...

[neverm0re]

Sousveillance[1] seems to really answer 'Who watches the watchmen?' with 'We all do'. Ultimately I think not only crime will go down, but also more egregious cases of corruption. This is more harmful to governments in the long run who like a rather tight control over information, as the internet constantly demonstrates. I'm slowly learning to be okay with this aspect of AR.

It's the /services/ that Glass secretly enable for its users that I find far more worrying than mere scrapbooking of your life. Just start thinking as sleazy as possible here, for a moment. If Glass can log conversations, it can also relay conversations to other parties to comment upon.

I just can't stop imagining things like MTurk-like services staffed with popped-collar sociopaths fresh off the set of Jersey Shore, all working with your transcripts to be your 'virtual wingman' as you work your 'game' on unsuspecting people. Ridiculous, but just sleazy enough I could see it.

I imagine if we all really just wanted to depress ourselves today, we could keep coming up with more and more ideas of how to exploit AR for social advantage/manipulation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

[surfaceTensi0n]

A slightly more futuristic take on AR's sleazy side:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/08/02/sight_a_s...

[dsr_]

What I really want is for police officers on duty to be required to have it on and recording all their interactions with citizens.

[purplelobster]

A very good use for this technology. Officers on duty are not entitled to privacy in my opinion. Everything should be recorded and archived to deter corrupt behavior.

[danso]

Dashboard cams in Russia are ostensibly popular because they help document incidents of roadside violence/malfeasance

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/02/russian-dash-cams/

[drzaiusapelord]

Aren't these a requirement for any Russian auto insurance?

[jsn]

No.

[WestCoastJustin]

To a point this is already happening with cell phone cameras and social media. Lots of people were identified in the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot [1] due to pocket cameras and cellphone pictures/video.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_riot...

[drcube]

Actually, I think privacy concerns could be alleviated by something like this. It's just so much information, getting anything useful is like taking a sip from a fire hose.

Imagine your hypothetical break in is in downtown Manhattan. Do you really expect law enforcement to sift through video data of the hundreds of thousands of people who fit that profile? How would they know if someone's feed was missing? Basically, there's so much noise, the signal effectively gets lost.

Granted, big data applications could be brought to bear on the problem, but then it's the same cat and mouse game criminals and police have been playing forever.

[liber8]

I don't envision this being a problem at all. First, its easy enough to have a checkbox that says "I saw it, here's the feed you want." (In all likelihood, if anybody committed a crime in downtown Manhattan where hundreds of people were around, the cops wouldn't have any need to ask the public for data anyway.)

If nobody saw it (or doesn't know what they were looking at, as would usually be the case if they saw a getaway car), I still don't think there will be a firehose of data. The feed will already be geotagged and time stamped, making it easy to sift through by hand. Plus, much of this can be automated, even with the relatively rudimentary recognition software we have now.

[wklauss]

A lot of security falls into that "firehose" analogy. Your door lock is relatively trivial to brute-force. What is preventing thieves from entering your house is that you live surrounded by other targets.

Problem with the Glass approach is that we now require police to sit through videos, but eventually it will be easier to mine all the data with algorithms, especially if we get better at facial recognition, etc...

Personally, i don't mind a glass-pervasive society. I worry about the fact that all the data goes around a single company's infrastructure and the fact that, for this specific company, hardware is a commodity and data is what they are after.

[md224]

I think the concept of mass surveillance of one other has been a concern of wearable/ubiquitous computing for a while now. Google "sousveillance" for more writing on this.

[pasbesoin]

If you want a "professional's" speculation on this, read David Brin's "Earth". It's several years old, now, but this type of technology is one of the topics it took in fairly head on fashion, if also somewhat incidental to the main plot.

[nooneelse]

Or his non-science-fiction speculations on such matters in The Transparent Society. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society)

[purplelobster]

Watch the 3rd episode in the first season of "Black Mirror" to see some of the downsides of 24/7 video recording.

[WickyNilliams]

And to a certain degree the 2nd episode of the second season. Whilst it's not entirely central to the plot, it is touched upon with the pervasive recording via mobile phone.

[fizx]

SF already has a dedicated police dispatcher watching twitter for news of crime.