[ajross]

I understand the sentiment, but not really the direction of it. Why is Google Glass special here? We spend most of our public lives on CCTV already (seriously, we really do). Why is it more upsetting that normal people have access to this now instead of restaurants and stores and workplaces and public venues and...

I'm not saying there's no privacy issue here. I'm saying this ship has sailed. Why pick on Google and not your local convenience store?

[Samuel_Michon]

There is not one company that has access to all the CCTV cameras placed in restaurants and stores and workplaces and public venues.

If there were, that would be way creepy in and of itself. However, this is worse: the world's most powerful advertising company is turning consumers into spies.

It was bad enough for Google to track users' interests and whereabouts using its online services. Then with Streetview and its apps on Android, it started massively gathering physical information as well. With Glass, it'll have a cheap workforce that gathers the information of others as well.

Even if you've never consciously used a Google product or service in your life, if you live in a developed nation, Google knows about you and it already uses that information to influence your behavior [1][2].

Imagine how your life will change if only 1% of the people around you start using Google sponsored video cameras that are stealth, have high quality imaging, are always on, location aware, and always connected to the Internet: that's what Glass is.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/eli_pariser_beware_online_f...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/technology/29stream.html?_...

[nicholassmith]

The big thing will be because CCTV is used (generally) to record video and store it for X months until it's taped over by the store, Google on the other hand is a datavore and will quite happily use the information in a completely different way to CCTV.

[ajross]

CCTV is (and has been!) subject to virtually every abuse I can imagine Google Glass being used for. Glass will "generally" not be used for privacy invasion either, so I don't see how this logic works. (And the "won't be stored" point seems silly given that you can trivially store a surveillance camera record...). Obviously both can be abused. So why the one-sided outrage?

[cloudout]

I'm on CCTV all day, but my insurance company and employer don't use a mosaic from that data in quoting rates or doing background checks. Glass or anything similar, can change all of that.

The point is that valuable privacy silos are lost due to centralization by a sophisticated party, that makes money by selling that privacy.

[nicholassmith]

Of course CCTV has flaws, but for Ma and Pa shops with their own setups it's unlikely to be pwned by someone running facial recognition trackers or what not.

The outrage still is about the whom not the what. Most people are completely used to being filmed, what they're not used to is the data being sent to an organisation that is genuinely very, very good at processing data. I'd be surprised if most governments had data analysts and storage systems half as good as Google.

[waterlesscloud]

Quite simply, the likelihood of abuse is much, much higher with personal devices than with business devices.

This seems like it would be immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the public at large.

[recoiledsnake]

I believe you're invoking the fallacy of grey here.

The Sophisticate: "The world isn't black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else."

The Zetet: "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view..."

[ajross]

You've completely lost me here. Are you arguing that Google is grayer than 7/11? Can we have that argument instead, please?