[nrivadeneira]

I'm always amazed at how much anti-Glass sentiment I see in the tech community. I personally think it's going to be amazing. The best analogy I can think of is the heads-up display (HUD) in video games. The current use cases shown (texting, weather, pictures, etc.) are insignificant in comparison to the potential for combining with other wearable computing devices such as Fitbits, Fuelbands, Thalmic MYO's, etc.

Of course, this is an early iteration of the concept, but I see it as a game changer. Imagine removing the HUD from all of your video games. That experience sucks.

Now imagine a world where we can combine quantified-self computing, augmented reality, and new interface devices such as Thalmic MYO with the Glass...that future is a future I very much want to live in.

[mjn]

Maybe that's the fundamental disagreement, because that's a future I don't really want to live in. I don't like HUDs in videogames for the most part. And I don't want a bunch of shallow behaviorism everywhere, whether it's called gamification or quantified-self or life-as-an-A/B-test. The actual device itself I don't have any particular aversion to.

However so far all that does seem pretty easy to avoid, at least in your personal life, so I'm not extremely worried about it (gamification in the workplace may be harder to avoid, depending on your job and job options).

[gknoy]

I find your perspective to be refreshingly different than my own. I love the idea of a HUD - even it it's something I don't use often.

What I had not thought about was the privacy implications, and the more I think about it, the less happy I feel about people with it on all the time.

Part of me feels this fear is irrational, as I don't have a problem with people taking video with their cell phones. However, this deep-seated aversion to it seems more due to the it-might-always-be-on aspect -- similar to how most of us are OK with the idea of wiretaps when warranted, yet flip out about the recent intelligence news.

Penny Arcade and some other articles I've read have really reinforced the perspective that people will want to punch me in the face for using Glass. I think Glass's biggest hurdle will not be the prospect of looking silly, but of all of your friends saying "Turn that damn thing off before I break it".

[nrivadeneira]

I don't know if I'm in the minority, but I don't really care if people have Glass on around me. People have cameras with them at all times these days due to smartphones. The fact that it's not attached to their head is not what's stopping them from taking photos and video at inappropriate times. I don't see myself beginning to take unsolicited photos any more than I would have with my phone (aka never) just because I have Glass on. I imagine the same goes for most people you have any sort of meaningful interaction with.

[angersock]

Here, let's go the other way (maybe they even go together!):

Let's imagine a world where you sign up for discounts on certain goods in exchange for allowing your Glass to randomly take pictures throughout the day. This data is mined and tagged and sorted, until one day the .gov or .mil or some hacker decides to pull it and use it for nefarious purposes.

The fact is that the nerd fantasy of getting a HUD (to track what, exactly? Ammo? Health? Some numbers in a database you've been trained to equate with self-worth?) is not worth the societal cost of losing privacy.

"But we've already got smartphones with cameras!" doesn't work--the camera is there, and likely just a change of app policy away from being always on.

This is such a shortsighted idea.

[nrivadeneira]

What a ridiculous slippery-slope assertion. The same argument could be said for the telephone - "Inevitably some company will offer discounts in exchange for random recordings of your phone calls. Everyone will sign up for that and then a hacker will take advantage of it."

There are at least two reasons stuff like that doesn't occur: 1) The cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data far outweighs any sort of tangential benefit a company may get from such a policy. That's on top of the massive PR risk. 2) The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant as to not constitute any sort of grand 'societal loss of privacy'.

[angersock]

The telephone example is near exactly Google Voice, right? Massive voice database for the cost of some subsidized VoIP and storage?

"...cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data..."

You do realize that this is exactly the Google and Facebook business model, right? Targeted advertising using user-generated content?

"The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant"

Over a billion people have signed up for Facebook, giving up their own social graph data and (as we've seen recently) address books, and that's just for a free shitty profile page whose design changes on a whim. Add a burger to that, and you've got a deal.

There's no slippery-slope here--at this point, the dataset is large and obvious enough that if you aren't blinded by the magical nerd future you'll see very reasonable concerns over what might happen.

[nrivadeneira]

Do you have any evidence that Google Voice records phone calls without a user's explicit permission? I was never referring to voicemails (which are rarely used these days anyway).

I also don't see how you can make the argument that passive recording of everyone around you is the same as Facebook only receiving data that a user proactively sends it (ie. status updates, photo uploads, etc.).

Finally, even if we were to accept your slippery-slope arguments as true, why not go further down the slope and claim that the internet shouldn't exist either because massive data sets about your lives are already being mined and are at risk of nefarious use?

[angersock]

Always, always with the absurd "hurr durr slippery slope what about this nonsensical extreme" stuff. If you cannot fathom the difference between the Internet as a loose federation of servers and services on an open protocol and network, and the sharecropping and fencing-in of modern walled gardens, I have nothing to say to you. If you can't figure out how the latter position is more easily abused than the former, I can't help you.

As for the voice stuff--look, given that much data, why wouldn't you mine it to improve things like transcription and whatnot?

(If a Googlebro wants to correct me on this, by all means go ahead.)

[nrivadeneira]

It's surprising you don't see the contradiction in saying that the open network of the internet is vastly different than our modern walled gardens, but then saying that our open real-world is comparable to the same walled gardens.

Also, I don't give much credibility to arguments that are based off an assertion like "I have no evidence, but...well, why wouldn't you?"

[lnanek2]

As a developer, writing for an expensive accessory like Glass is already a crap shoot. Writing for people who have two expensive accessories? There's almost no point.