Google Glass has the advantage that you can't tell if it's recording. "Don't worry, I'm not recording a video," they'll say. You can't accuse people of wearing glasses that may or may not record.
Similarly, when people use smartphones, they could be recording with the back camera, but people are okay with that. They assume no recording takes place simply because it's the more likely situation.
Even with a red LED, many people will not recognize Google Glass as a video capturing device. And if this product takes off, what's a person to do if he doesn't want to be recorded and tracked? Imagine sitting in the subway or at Starbucks around 10 Glass users.
I don't think video capture is the problem, it's bigger than that. Google Glass has hardware for not only capturing video (like CCTV does), but also audio, timecode information, and GPS coordinates. All that data combined, linked to the user's Google account, that makes for a data mining wet dream.
I wasn't suggesting humans will be looking at all the footage like with CCTV monitoring, Google has millions of servers to do that. It already analyzes the content of each and every YouTube video -- it provides automatic closed captioning, translations, it recognizes soundtrack and links to music stores, it displays ads depending on the video content, etc etc.
All right, I hear you. If the concern is that there will be automated algorithms looking through the video/GPS/etc. data, that is way more plausible of a concern.
So let's suppose the best case scenario for Google. Suppose they have all the access to 24/7 video, GPS data, facial tracking, etc. basically as much information as can potentially be gathered. And suppose they have all the computational power needed to process it in any realistic way they desire.
Can you suggest in what ways that might be bad for me? So perhaps Google can target me with the most relevant ads out of all ads. Is that a bad thing? I wouldn't mind seeing relevant ads rather than irrelevant ones anyway.
But what other hypothetical problems could come out of this?
I can imagine if I were a criminal and tried to hide something from others, then this would be a concern. But suppose I don't have much to hide, only personal private stuff (which, if exposed, wouldn't be much different from any other person's personal private stuff).
I'm interested in hearing what people have to say about this.
If Google put a light on the glasses that lights up whenever the glasses are recording, would you people stop acting like it's a big deal? A wearable computer with a heads-up interface is more than a spy camcorder.
Similarly, when people use smartphones, they could be recording with the back camera, but people are okay with that. They assume no recording takes place simply because it's the more likely situation.