Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

I'm a lot more worried about the privacy implications on a macro scale than I am about some random person getting a photo of my private bits.

The scary part of Glass-like devices taken to their logical conclusion for me isn't the little individual invasions of privacy (though those are also unfortunate), but the massive amount of real-time, real-world information collected in the aggregate.

If Glass-like devices are ever mainstream and controlled by one entity they create the easy possibility for an information mesh network that makes the one shown in "The Dark Knight" look absolutely quaint in comparison. Ubiquitous video + audio + advanced feature detection destroys personal privacy when in public basically across the board, even if you yourself are not a participant.

eg:

EvilOverlord: "Glass-MCP-10k, where is George McBay?"

Glass-MCP-10k: "Scanning... Subject George McBay last seen entering residential building 10.5 seconds ago at 32.925924,-117.227812. Data based on facial recognition match with 96.75% confidence. 5 Gargoyles report seeing him within 1 mile radius of this location within the last 10 minutes."

I see the massive benefits of Glass-like-devices but I am also terribly concerned about the possible privacy implications. The potential for abuses could be staggering and given that I think it is a good idea to actually discuss the potential for problems and not just assume everything will be okay because the tech is "neat" (yes, it is!, but...).

"The scary part of Glass-like devices taken to their logical conclusion for me isn't the little individual invasions of privacy (though those are also unfortunate), but the massive amount of real-time, real-world information collected in the aggregate."

As opposed to the world without Google Glass, where people are constantly taking pictures in public and then uploading those pictures to Facebook? Honestly, singling out Google Glass is just a diversion, probably driven by Google's competitors who could not see how a head-mounted display could be useful.

There's a huge difference in terms of scale (assuming Glass becomes as mainstream as Google hopes it will be) and real-time accessibility of the information.

I am not a Google competitor. I use lots of Google products daily: gmail, nexus 4, ARM Chromebook, Go, I even have a Google TV box. And yet I still feel Glass has massive potential for privacy abuse on a scale never seen outside of maybe the NSA.

I am really not seeing how that is the case. There are so many photos being uploaded without Google Glass that it is possible to reconstruct a model of an entire town using those photographs. We already crossed the point of having large numbers of photographs taken without our permission uploaded corporations that do not care about any of us. The most dramatic change with Glass will not be the number of photos, but the applications that will be possible.

A while ago, a friend of mine sent me a picture he found on Facebook. It is me and my best friends from college at a party on the first night of our freshman year. We were all in the background of the picture -- it was completely inadvertent that we were photographed. That was nearly a decade ago, long before Google Glass was even a concept.

You are not going to see more privacy abuse resulting from Glass than you already see resulting from the combination of smartphones and online social networks. I do not want Facebook to build a profile about me, but guess what? My friends and family upload pictures of me to Facebook without asking permission, complete with metadata, which is added to a database that has my browsing habits (surreptitiously collected) and tidbits gathered from any mention of me by those same friends. What do you think Glass is going to add to this situation?

Furthermore, what solution would you propose? We as a society already managed to dig ourselves into a hole, where we have become dependent on large corporations to satisfy our computing needs; if you want a technical solution, you are going to have to trust Google to implement it. Legal solutions would likely further restrict our freedoms and worsen an already overly complicated legal code, restricting our ability to take pictures or used head-mounted displays and other wearable computers.

Another scenario, Google constantly runs a system looking at tweets, texts, and news stories. Anytime something happens that is criminal and significant enough for it to notice, it turns up the logging for all the Glass devices in the area.

If it were opt-in to send the resulting log to law enforcement, that would be totally fine. If not, things get worrisome. But what about in between? Say sending the log in is only done when the user clicks ok, but the police subpena Google for who all had their Glass devices in that area, so they can contact them directly. Gets into the area of withholding evidence and such.

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