The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good

The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good

Google Glass might change your life, but not in the way you think.

... lifebits, the ability to record video of the people, places, and events around you, at all times. ...

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. ... you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world. ...

... the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus ... Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index. ...

Let’s return to the bus ride. It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could immediately be identified by that Google Glass user who gets on the bus and turns the camera toward you. Anything you say within earshot could be recorded, associated with the text, and tagged to your online identity. And stored in Google’s search index. Permanently.

Read the whole article for all the rest. Suffice it to say that Glass has the potential to completely eliminate any concept of privacy. And all done without any government intervention, and as a result of individuals voluntarily paying lots of money for the privilege.

Maybe it won't happen, but I would never bet against people being catastrophically stupid simply because someone says it's "cool".

Mind you, I happen to like the idea of being able to record everything you see and hear, so you can later cut/paste excerpts to keep for posterity. It means you won't miss a moment simply because it took too long to get your camera. But for me, I want those videos to stay in my possession. I want to be the one who decides what gets shared with the world and I certainly don't want some faceless corporation storing and cross-referencing my entire life for everybody else in the world to go picking through.