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A comment on Google Glass sales halted. Parent comment

Re:Google Glass sales halted by TeMPOraL on Thursday January 15, 2015 @07:03PM (#8896324)
My point is, everyone is talking only about the consequences. I'm perfectly aware of them (and so I don't see a point of mentioning them in my comment; everyone else keeps bringing them up). I'm definitely not advocating pushing blindly for more data collection. But then again, while authoritarianism is a real threat that needs to be addressed, some level of "privacy" people are so afraid to lose could probably be relinquished, yielding more benefit than harm.
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Re:Google Glass sales halted by krapp on Thursday January 15, 2015 @07:35PM (#8896488)
Glass seems designed to make it impossible not to relinquish one's privacy. Granted, cellphones could conceivably be used is almost the same way, but they're not meant to be. If you're in the wearer's field of view, you give up whatever the technology can take. That's intentional, and the attempt to make that ubiquitous on the part of Google, a company whose entire reason for being is data collection, is also intentional.

Even if there is a possible net benefit, there will also be, inevitably, be a loss of control over identity and autonomy that no one can be blamed for not wanting to give up without a fight (futile though it might be.)

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Re:Google Glass sales halted by TeMPOraL on Thursday January 15, 2015 @09:18PM (#8896915)
My issue with Glass hate is that people say it's about the camera - it's not. It's about the fact that they know there's a camera. There's a lot of cheap cameras embedded in glasses, pens or even clothing, that anyone can buy from a random 'spy shop' down the corner. We're long past point of random stalkers filming people. So all that objections against Glass killed useful technology (AR) for zero real gain in privacy.

> Even if there is a possible net benefit, there will also be, inevitably, be a loss of control over identity and autonomy that no one can be blamed for not wanting to give up without a fight (futile though it might be.)

I think we'll have to learn how to live with that. I doubt that a lot will change though.

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Re:Google Glass sales halted by krapp on Thursday January 15, 2015 @09:54PM (#8897021)
I think it's not so much even knowing there's a camera, but knowing there's a camera which might be on and streaming to the cloud at all times. Yes, I know there's a little light. No, no one is going to trust it.

There aren't a lot of random spy shops down the corner, and not a lot of random stalkers sneaking upskirts of people on escalators with pen cameras hidden in their shoes.

You could make the argument that cellphones are far more powerful as tools for surveillance (and they certainly are in regards to surveilling their owners) than Glass would have been capable of. And you would have a point - for maybe the first couple of generations, and before there were several million Glasses in the wild. At that point, being a random stalker becomes socially acceptable, and being randomly stalked becomes unavoidable.

Consumer AR isn't entirely dead. I've seen it on portable game consoles. But Google's attempt to literally shove it into people's faces demonstrates that there are more than technical hurdles to overcome.

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Re:Google Glass sales halted by flomo on Friday January 16, 2015 @12:30AM (#8897398)
I think it's much more complex than that. Here was my first experience observing someone using Google Glass in the field, in a SF coffeehouse:

>See attractive woman.

>See bespeckled gentleman apparently leering grotesquely at the attractive woman.

>Realize he has Google Glasses on. OK, he might just be checking the weather. Perhaps in order to use this, you have to stare off into space, with your mouth hanging open like the creepmaster.

>Second-guess whether he was really using the glasses or just filming the woman.

It isn't just that one knows there's a camera, it that using the thing mucks deeply with humans' instinctual reaction in reading people's eyes and faces. It's the ambiguity around the camera and the undermining of one's instinctual reactions to eye-contact. A shoecam is a shoecam. Something mounted near your eyeballs is entirely different.

There's also the aspect that may of us already spend 50-75% of our lives looking at screens. Most people know 'that guy' who can't go out for breakfast without checking his feeds between bites of huevos ranchero. IMO, "it make anti-social activities even easier" was never a very good sell (perhaps outside the googleplex.)

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Re:Google Glass sales halted by TeMPOraL on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:57AM (#8897698)
>> Second-guess whether he was really using the glasses or just filming the woman.

I can't help but ask: so what? I know I might be totally biased here as I never had an issue with being filmed, but such examples make me feel we're trying to blame technology for what is our society having trouble with its own sexuality.

I accept this is an issue, though I personally don't "feel it".

> There's also the aspect that may of us already spend 50-75% of our lives looking at screens. Most people know 'that guy' who can't go out for breakfast without checking his feeds between bites of huevos ranchero. IMO, "it make anti-social activities even easier" was never a very good sell (perhaps outside the googleplex.)

Now this attitude, very common among people, is IMO unfair and feels like bullying. I am 'that guy'. And you know why I'm sticked to some screen for most of the day? Because brain-computer interfaces are not here yet. I'd be happy to use some different interface like, say, AR glasses but hey, aren't those being frowned upon because they have a camera? sigh.

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Re:Google Glass sales halted by unclebucknasty on Thursday January 15, 2015 @10:41PM (#8897140)
>some level of "privacy" people are so afraid to lose could probably be relinquished, yielding more benefit than harm

But, I think the question is who gets to make that decision? Who gets to say how much should be relinquished and decide when there is more benefit than harm?

You could say, "well, anyone who doesn't like it can elect not to use X technology." But, that will become increasingly difficult as more and more "core" technology adopts less privacy-oriented models.

So, I am cautious about advocating an approach of continuing to push and erode privacy as long as there is some argument for additional benefit. I think it is very much a slippery slope and we have already experienced some of the slippage. A little privacy here. A little privacy there. And, it is difficult to walk it back.

So, we are redefining what we consider a reasonable expectation of privacy as a society. Too much of that definition seems to be coming from commercial interests and, I believe, many people are feeling uncomfortable with the increasing erosion of their privacy and the decisions that are being made for them.

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