Google Glass and “Privacy”

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By Sam Forrest

Any smartphone nowadays has as much raw computing power as a top-of-the-line laptop from 10 years ago

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78 per cent of young people, ages 12 to 17, now have cellphones. Nearly half of those are smartphones, a share that's increasing steadily

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One in four young people say they are "cell-mostly" Internet users, a percentage that increases to about half when the phone is a smartphone.

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Nomophobia describes the anxiety felt when someone has no access to mobile technology

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“I've had students tell me that they bring their cell phones in the shower with them. They sleep with them”

-Stephen Groening, George Mason University

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The business model of today’s free social media networks and search engines, of course, is collecting and storing behavior and interests of every kind…

…and selling that information to marketers

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And companies are getting better at organizing and finding out about every last bit of a user’s social life, whether it’s a party picture or a preference for a certain kind of shoe

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Once a lamentable image is released into the world and stored on a social network’s server and your friends’ smartphones, it can be hard to delete…

What the public has yet to realize…is that their data are not only being archived but also analyzed and scored.

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“Whenever I ask someone, do they want control over the messages and media that they send to others, the answer 100 percent is yes.”

-Nico Sell, Wickr Co-Founder

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While none of us were looking, Google -- the most data-hungry of today's digital giants -- is reengineering mobile technology

“Glass will also have an automatic picture-taking mode, snapping pics at a preset intervals (such as every 5 seconds).”

-Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder

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Google Glass opens an entirely new front in the digital war against privacy. These spectacles, which have been specifically designed to record everything we see, represent a developmental leap in the history of data that is comparable to moving from the bicycle to the automobile.

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It is the sort of radical transformation that may actually end up completely destroying our individual privacy in the digital 21st century.

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For Google, “privacy" means "what you've agreed to”, and that is slightly different from the privacy we've become used to over time.

So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?

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By getting us to wear their all seeing digital eyeglasses, Google are metamorphosing us into human versions of those Street View vans -- now thankfully banned in Germany -- which crawl, like giant cockroaches, around our cities documenting our homes

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The terabytes of data sucked up every five seconds by its omniscient glasses will, of course, flow to Google. That's the whole business model, the very raison d'etre of Google Glass. Those pics every 5 seconds will be used to aggregate data and then to generate billions of dollars of revenue by selling advertising around it.

Can a child properly consent to filming or being filmed? Is an adult, who happens to be visible in a camera's peripheral vision in a bar, consenting?

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The idea that you could inadvertently become part of somebody else's data collection – that could be quite alarming. And Google has already become the company which knows where you are and what you're looking for...

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Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're

looking at

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Supermarkets and packaging companies spend lots of money trying to work out which packages you look at first on a shelf. Potentially, through Google Glass, they would be capturing that data as standard. That would be quite powerful – to be able to say why people buy things.

Google Glass, thus, may become the pivotal post PC, post iPod and post tablet device. A pooling of all our most intimate data, a mirror of ourselves -- the holy grail, of course, for advertisers.Photo by hawk2009 (Flickr)

Credits

All images are licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 agreement and sourced from Flickr.

Photo by DarrelBirkett (Flickr)

Sources

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http://readwrite.com/2013/04/08/teenagers-smartphones-how-theyre-changing-the-world

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9714616/Mobile-phone-addiction-ruining-relationships.html

http://www.ctvnews.ca/more-youth-use-smartphones-to-log-online-u-s-report-1.1193559#ixzz2Qnxqu5cd

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-07/snapchat-and-the-erasable-future-of-social-media

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/25/tech/innovation/google-glass-privacy-andrew-keen

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/06/google-glass-threat-to-our-privacy