If it's prediction time, here's mine: The time of hyper-multitasking, constant broadcasting of minute details to even the most distant acquaintances is over; the big luxury will be being able to spend uninterrupted time on a single, meaningful thing, without being constantly interrupted by emails/tweets/fb messages/chats etc. People rent cabins in the forest to get things done - and they got those things done and might serve as inspirational role models for others.
Even Hackernews could be considered as support for this view, as it tends to encourage people to use the long, well-thought form instead of the quick snip. The most useful posts that I read here must have taken its writers more than an hour (admittedly, this is not one of those brilliant posts).
If Google Glass succeeds - and it is possible that it does, then it will most certainly not be based on the immediate exchange of images with others a long way away. If a picture is worth taking and worth sending, it is worth getting out the smartphone or camera. At least in my generation very few people have time and the wish to constantly interrupt their work or play to check yet another sunset in NY/Shanghai/Rio.
I don't see these two futures as necessarily incompatible, and could certainly use more time alone in cabins. But sometimes it's better to both relax and be productive with other people, and technology is good for removing the constraint that those people be in the same place. Maybe Glass won't be a device on which we receive minute social updates, but it can still be useful for the same reasons a telephone is useful. Maybe it could even have a similar busy signal, so you're not interrupted if you're already talking to someone.
I think the 'worth' of a picture depends on the circumstances – people take many more pictures than they did twenty years ago, now that we don't need to get the film developed – and a further simplification of the process might lower the threshold further. A pretty sunset is a pretty sunset, but the pretty sunset from someone you love halfway around the world is something different. An interesting thing about Glass is that it minimizes the duration of the interruption needed to both send and receive that sunset.
I've stayed out of this debate so far for various reasons, but there is a specific privacy issue with Glass that I haven't noticed anyone else raising yet.
It is inevitable that Google Glass will have real time facial recognition, whether Google wants them to or not (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/11/google-glass-...). Or, that a similar product offering that capability hits the market once Glass becomes popular enough.
If you are a felon, or have ever been arrested on an accusation of a serious crime, that is a future that you're not excited about. If you've ever been in the media -- even on a purely local basis -- for anything salacious, that's not a future you can be excited about. You can probably get Google Image Search results for "[your county] arrested" (worked for a couple of counties that I sampled at random); there are websites like mugshots.com that republish mug shots and details of the arrest.
As it is now, the only thing that ex-cons and others in similar situations have going for them is the relatively short attention span of the public and a vanishingly small support network of other ex-cons and people willing to give them another chance.
The rest of society, for the most part, regards them as unequal citizens (and in some cases, sub-human, depending on the offense).
An apartment complex might choose to rent to an ex-con for some reason; once the technology is available, management will have to deal with outraged neighbors and many apartment complexes will simply stop renting to them. An employer might give someone a job but not disclose that person's personal history to their co-workers; if the technology becomes ubiquitous enough, that will stop being an option too.
I don't think the technology itself is inherently bad. But, I don't think society has yet reached a point of maturity where it can gracefully handle this.
Can we discuss why mugshots.com is still the top result? Their main pitch is:
UNPUBLISHING SERVICE FROM
THE MUGSHOTS.COM DATABASE
HOURS OF OPERATION: 7AM -11PM EST
Which seems to be extortion. If they were a group of people deeply concerned about convicts in their midsts that would be a different issue, but they seem to be running a "pay us and we'll go away" business model, which it seems reasonable to beliebe the search engines should punish in the same way they do content farms.
>>Google should ... rather develop it as a novel device for directed, private communication.
Private in what way? Private between us and Google? Private between us and Google and the NSA?
This blog post ignores the reality before our very eyes, something we don't need Google Glass for. It is merely another data acquisition tool for Google and any usefulness beyond that is incidental.
There are many Googlers here, you know :) You either talk about G positively or not at all.
The glass is the most Orwellian thing I've ever heard of. The only thing that could beat it would be direct brain interfaces, capable of stealing thoughts.
it is amusing that you mentioned this because google's business strategy is to steadily erode the privacy of all human beings and monetize it at each step. they can try to dance around this all day with marketing and it doesn't matter.
it's only a matter of time before the glass hardware has an attachment that reads your mind so you exert even less effort than currently, e.g. blinking. google will then take that data and sell it to marketers, the USG, and whoever else they can, so everyone knows what you're going to think before you think it. google predictive thinking... so sad.
i think most people are unwilling to acknowledge such a problem with their business strategy exists, and if they do acknowledge it, are unwilling or unable to grasp the full extent of the problem. google, like many large organizations, hides malicious actions behind a veil of complexity. "don't be evil" is certainly a matter of perspective.
i will refrain from citing other examples of hiding behind the veil of complexity since i don't want to "poke the bear" :)
I also don't want to be recorded by convenience store or shopping mall cctv, or by repo man ANPR, or by red light / speeding cameras.
We've lost that argument though.
What I would like to see, is for there to be appropriate responsibility assumed by the people taking advantage of the privilege of recording everything. I eagerly await the first few court cases where someone drunkenly records and uploads to youtube something that they _really_ shouldn't have, and a judge and jury decides it's entirely appropriate to hold Glass-wearers to account for what they choose to record and publish.
I'm genuinely curious: why don't you want to be recorded at malls et al?
What's the difference between such surveillance and a security guard wondering around looking for suspicious activity and/or protecting shoppers/businesses?
Surely, it can be abused, but it can also help protect "suspicious" individuals from being profiled/targeted maliciously by such security guard, for example.
What if you were hit an intersection and said cameras helped to identify the individual who hit you and then ran, would that change your mind?
I don't think surveillance is the problem as much as who does it and the laws they implement.
> What's the difference between such surveillance and a security guard wondering around looking for suspicious activity and/or protecting shoppers/businesses?
Scale and awareness?
Scale, because if you ask that guard, who was buying what with whom, 742 days ago, chances are that guard won't be able to answer in any meaningful way. A database might (if eg: indexed on biometrics).
Awareness, because we come to ignore cameras, while if someone is actually there, looking at you, you are aware of being watched. (And also aware when their back is turned, so you can sneak a kiss from your mistress, or whatever you're not comfortable doing "on the permanent record" -- but might not be wrong).
The difference is "recording". Or, more specifically, recording and never deleting the recording.
I guess it isn't so much the surveillance itself that bothers me, its three things: 1) the idea that technology now allows surveillance to be ubiquitous, 2) that the security guard's observations don't attempt to identify me and observations don't "persist" across multiple visits/venues, and 3)that all the surveillance data is archived forever - ready to be abused/sold/profited-from whenever somebody thins of a way to make a buck out of it (or, more paranoid/cynically, invents new retroactive laws then goes looking for past indiscretions…)
What makes you think you have a right to tell someone else what they can record in a public place? You cannot have an expectation of privacy in public.
(This is the beginning of a much longer comment I wrote in another thread a few days back - see the full version here if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6043640 )
"You have no expectation of privacy when in public."
I'm seeing this objection a lot lately, and perhaps I'm showing my age here, but I've certainly got an "expectation of being largely individually anonymous when in public". While there's nothing to stop people looking for me and possibly finding me in public - I _don't_ expect people(/corporations/tlagencies) to be recording everybody in public spaces and archiving them permanently in ways that allow all archived recordings of me to eventually be crossreferenced and de-anonymised.
> Personally, I'm of the opinion that "public space personally identifiable data collection" should be regulated similarly to HIPPA.
I don't think that's possible; I don't think regulation can work here. Things like HIPPA and PCI regulate a very small number of providers. Regulating the general public at large from getting a picture of you in public on their Google Glass type device just isn't really technically or socially feasible and that will be where the majority of this type of surveillance happens. Beyond that, the next generation doesn't have the privacy expectations that you do; they see you as an old man clinging to old ways.
> I _don't_ expect people(/corporations/tlagencies) to be recording everybody in public spaces and archiving them permanently in ways that allow all archived recordings of me to eventually be crossreferenced and de-anonymised.
Then adjust your expectations, because that is the future and it won't and likely can't be stopped. Have a look at the movie A Scanner Darkly to see a more feasible solution, anonymous masks worn by those who don't want to be seen.
I don't expect to "stop" Larry or Serge (or anyone else) from walking through Delores Park with their Glass on while I'm there (at the same time, I fully expect the doorman at Zeitgeist to tell em "Sorry, you can't come in here with those"). An individual recording stuff they're seeing anyway is pretty much "their right" - what they then choose to do with that recording though, is just as much their responsibility. For example, if you record someone walking out of Good Vibrations or Crazy Horse, and you choose to upload that to YouTube to make fun of them, and that person then loses their job over it (perhaps at the church-owned school they work at?) - I'd like to see you held to account for that action (and held financially responsible for breaching someone else's privacy).
This is actually codified into my local (NSW, Australian) Law in part. It's legal to record (audio and/or video) any interaction you have with a police officer. It's _not_ legal to "publish" that recording without the officers consent. Practically, it's been determined that you can't introduce a recording of your interaction with police as evidence in court (at least without the recorded police's agreement), but you _can_ tell the judge you've got a recording that proves a police officer is lying in his testimony, and the judge can request to see the recording. This has become very well known amongst profiled and targeted groups (for me, many motorcycle riders indiscriminately targeted as "outlaw motorcycle gang members" routinely record all police interactions and several high-profile lawyers recommend it).
Where I think this become important - is when many such recordings are collected together. Larry and his Glass, you and your Glass - they have small scale privacy implications, and barring those users doing something obviously stupid with them (which is no different from cellphone camera "etiquette" - if you go hanging outside abortion clinics, mental health clinics, drug rehabilitation centers, or schools with your camera/phone/Glass - and distribute the pictures you capture, you should expect consequences). I think though that Google (or anybody else) should consider the collection of many many user's Glass images/video/audio to be a potential-nightmare privacy problem _for them_. Before they start archiving all that, I think someone should be asking the same sort of questions you'd ask the junior developer who says "I'm just logging all the form data, so we can use it for debugging later" - You'd be asking "Hang on, _all_ the form data? The personally identifying information? The credit card number/expiry/ccv? The social security number? The medical history? And you're just writing that all out in cleartext to the public webserver logfles? Ummm, nope. I've just revoked your commit credentials and powered down the webserver - you might want to gather your things, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out…"
I don't think it "shouldn't be allowed", but I do think people implementing wholesale gathering of "public space personally identifiable data" should be held to high standards of responsibility for having that collection - "High" as in "if we screw up and this data get misused/exposed/stolen, that'll be to a very high level of likelyhood a CEO/CTO/company-destroying event" standards. You don't "just collect all the health information you can", you don't "just collect all the credit card information you can", _I'd_ like public-space surveillance to be the same. I'd like mall operators to say "Of course we don't archive video surveillance - we've got procedures and policies in place to delete all recordings over 1 week old unless we get a written police request for specific cameras/times/persons-of-interest, and we have a monthly task that checks and ensures that policy is adhered to."
You're still presuming there's a top down gathering; that's not what's going to happen. It's going to be a bottom up thing like flickr is to photographs, people uploading their own shit real-time and storing it online. The host will not be responsible for user generated content and the law isn't going to be able to police hundreds of millions of users anymore than they do now, which is basically none. You don't have a right to privacy in public; public means public.
More importantly, laws can't stop the progress of technology; the genie cannot be put back into the bottle because some people are uncomfortable with it. You can't stop someone from photographing you and putting it on the Internet and it will be no different with video. It's already no different, see youtube. Things like Glass will simply make it easier, but it's already being done.
same here! i want nothing to do with the world of pointless media sharing or other people's perception that recording everything is worthwhile.
if i could legally destroy every glass rig that was anywhere near me, i would be a happy person indeed. the unfortunate situation that now arises is a surveillance arms race, wherein it is illegal (in most countries) to undertake destructive or jamming actions against surveillance technology, be it radio or cellular frequency EM waves, a horde of idiots with cameras or the intelligence services that record all internet traffic, including this post. i would rather not participate, but the concept of passive/massive resistance simply will not work against such technology.
i don't want to develop my own countersurveillance to keep the glassholes at bay. however, i and people who care about privacy are left with few options. i would love to see some legit countermeasures for glass.
This may be right, but to me, as a doubter, I'm well aware of potential benefits, but my creepiness radar comes from the feeling that there is a point where recording becomes too intrusive. If I'm in a public bathroom and someone is snapping photos, that it's too intrusive. And the problem with glass is that you never know wether its just sitting on someone's head, or it is recording. I don't see the benefits of ubiquitous telepresence overcoming the creepiness of ubiquitous telepresence.
Our existing mobile devices can be used in similar creepy ways, but we've learned to discern between the postures people use for taking photos with their phones, and their postures for doing everything else with their phones. We certainly pay an "attention tax" to maintain an awareness of nearby devices, but we've gotten over the creepiness.
It's possible that we'll learn similar patterns for Glass. While we won't know if the device itself is recording, we might still be able to guess based on where the wearer is looking and how quickly they are moving. On the flip side, Glass wearers might also change their postures and habits so as to avoid matching these newly-learned patterns.
Exactly. I think it boils down to the fear that we don't know when the camera is active. When we're holding out our smart phone in a certain way, people know we're taking a photo. Google could build glass with a bright flashing on-air light, which would help, but absent obvious physical gestures, we'll wonder wether the device has been rooted to disable the light.
Don't get me wrong, I do think its unfortunate, because there are real positive sides to the device, and you touch on them in your blog, but for me, unless I feel better about the hair raising on the back of my neck, I'm going to be hesitant to accept the devices. (Caveat: I'm a bit of a privacy nut, that has never used Facebook, twitter, uses brivate browsing whereever possible, uses SMIME to encrypt most of my emails, etc., so my experience may not be very indicative)
Yeah, I understand. I was speculating about possible changes to social norms and body postures in response to recording technology like Glass. As an alternative to an indicator light, maybe Glass-wearers will learn not to look at other people at all, so as not to give the impression that they are recording. Similarly, perhaps there are ways that we held our pre-camera cell phones that would now imply recording, so we've all subconsciously learned to hold our new phones differently.
In other words, it could be a lack of obvious physical gestures that indicates we are not recording, rather than the presence of obvious physical gestures that indicate we are recording.
A world in which we don't 'point' our heads at strangers is definitely weird and possibly undesirable, but interesting to think about.
I see the value, even though I'm ambivalent about the concept. I'd love to get my hands on something like it, but given the NSA revelations, not from Google (and not from Microsoft, either).
The irony is that I'd probably trust something from Taiwan or Korea. Ironic in that when I did work for the government,anything manufactured in these countries automatically ruled it out.
There's an odd series on youtube called H+[1] that is about implanted computers (and a killer virus) that has some interesting scenes that could apply to Google Glass and its ilk. Some are amusing but dangerous (husband watching sports while driving), and some get a bit creepy. Sadly, their picture of how the media would handle it is accurate[2].
The virus and information "appropriation" fears for this type of device are very real. If you think people went batshit crazy over some startup uploading address books or Apple keeping an unencrypted list of cell towers, then you haven't seen anything when the first glass virus or "they're tracking us scare" hits a congressional committee[3].
Its one thing for the twilight zone object on my desk to freak out. Its a lot more personal when I carry it in my pocket. Its beyond scary when its on my face.
Thanks for the link, I'll watch some of these. I agree the viruses/etc are a serious issue, and I'm not sure if I'm more worried about the first virus for Glass, or the first viruses for self driving cars and Amazon delivery quadcopters ... :)
It's sad when the best they can do is conjure up the twentieth consecutive year of "natural feeling video conferencing is right around the corner!" as an excuse for allowing marketeers to use techno-fetishism to push omnipresent corporatized surveillance in to society and public spaces. (The video conferencing argument is a failure and will remain such: people prefer telephones, and it never feels natural.)
As far as I can tell, all the mentioned scenarios address pretty niche markets.
Personally I don't see mass adoption of Google Glass in any kind of conceivable future, I see head-up displays in very specific settings as the winning solution, instead of an always on, general-purpose solution.
Aren't the mobile photo sharing and messaging markets both large and established? Past technologies that have made those tasks slightly faster or easier have seen widespread adoption, and it seems possible the same thing could happen with Glass.
This debate about knowing when Glass is recording puzzles me a bit. We have an established way to indicate that a device is recording across both camcorders and webcams on laptops - a small light indicating when the camera is on.
On most camcorders it's a small red light. On Macs it's green.
Glass has an indicator towards the back that is poorly visible. Just move it to the front and maybe make it a little brighter.
Last I checked, no one is running away from a person walking around with a camcorder that's not on. When it is on, it's easy to see and step out of the view.
Personally, I no longer trust these established indicators. I now feel justified in assuming that backdoors are built into most systems and that Glass could be recording at any time, without my approval and without any indication.
It’s possible to wire the LED directly to the power of the camera. That way if the camera receives power the LED is also on. There is no way to change this behaviour in software. (This is how the indicator lights on Macs and presumably many other indicator lights are wired up.)
No, but it is comparatively easy to change this behaviour in hardware, so what's the point? Having an indicator that, "very often" works, is in some ways worse than not having an indicator at all...
Yeah, if someone has actual physical access to your device they might be able to detach the LED. Not easy to do – but imaginable. But that is hardly an in any way relevant scenario.
Are you serious or cracking a joke? I honestly can't tell. Because it seemed like you were slowly describing how to turn the supposedly cool and hip google glass into the borg headset:
With the recent relations of the spying that happens on civilians by the NSA, and other government security agencies, are we ready for something like Google glass?
Even Hackernews could be considered as support for this view, as it tends to encourage people to use the long, well-thought form instead of the quick snip. The most useful posts that I read here must have taken its writers more than an hour (admittedly, this is not one of those brilliant posts).
If Google Glass succeeds - and it is possible that it does, then it will most certainly not be based on the immediate exchange of images with others a long way away. If a picture is worth taking and worth sending, it is worth getting out the smartphone or camera. At least in my generation very few people have time and the wish to constantly interrupt their work or play to check yet another sunset in NY/Shanghai/Rio.
But maybe that is truly a generational thing.