sh linked a really interesting post about Google Glass today:
The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
Although I'm generally pro-Google Glass I think this raises a couple of really important issues. One is privacy, the other is forced participation.
When I think about privacy there are two main aspects. One is the physical -- who, where, and how observation is occurring. The second is temporal locality.
When you're out and about you can generally tell who is observing you, and how. You can see if someone is looking at you, and you can tell when someone is pointing a camera your way (generally speaking, I'm ignoring creepers here).
What changed with digital recording and the Internet is two things -- the ability to cheaply create & archive digital recordings made distribution easier, and the reach of the Internet made it possible to reach audiences much larger than the original real world audience.
e.g. you may fart in a train of 15 people but the subsequent upload to YouTube may reach millions of viewers. You farted in public and felt embarrassed but embarrassment in front of 15 people is different to 10 million, possibly including your friends, family, professional acquaintances etc.
Digital recording & the Internet also changed the temporal aspect of privacy. Without a recording that moment of embarrassment is exactly that - a moment. Maybe a few of your fellow passengers will tell the story to their friends for giggles but after a few weeks most would have forgotten about the incident. But when it's recorded & uploaded to the Internet it will remain there probably forever.
The technology to record what Glass does exists in your smartphone today. What's different with Glass is that it makes surreptitious recording the norm, and its tight integration with Google, leading to the concern that such recordings may be archived & searchable forever more.
The more worrying issue that the linked post raises is that these factors combine to make participation compulsory for all.
The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience - it's the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.
Just think: if a million Google Glasses go out into the world and start storing audio and video of the world around them, the scope of Google search suddenly gets much, much bigger, and that search index will include you. Let me paint a picture. Ten years from now, someone, some company, or some organization, takes an interest in you, wants to know if you've ever said anything they consider offensive, or threatening, or just includes a mention of a certain word or phrase they find interesting. A single search query within Google's cloud - whether initiated by a publicly available search, or a federal subpoena, or anything in between - will instantly bring up documentation of every word you've ever spoken within earshot of a Google Glass device.
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this.
On one hand the idea of forced participation is extremely distasteful. People should not be forced to significantly alter their behaviour (e.g. having to wear disguises or not be seen/heard in public) because of Google Glass. That said, society decides collectively what trade-offs it is willing to make for the perceived benefits.
Our experience with Google StreetView, Facebook, and smartphones shows that as a whole we adapt quickly to intrusions upon our privacy, for good or bad. Glass will be no different -- there will be a period of debate as to what is and isn't acceptable followed by establishment of new norms; the question is what those new norms should be.
One option may be for Google to mitigate these issues by mirroring real world restrictions on the digitised data. e.g. if I record a video at 12pm at McDonalds Wynyard they might limit access (including searchability) to those who were physically present at the time.
There are still major problems with that - people need to trust Google to do it correctly (i.e. expect regular lapses in controls because Google is ultimately a collection of fallible humans), and it doesn't address the surveillance concerns since if the evidence exists it can always be subpoenaed.
My brain hurts.
