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Creepier By The Minute: Google Glass Will Identify People By Clothing Choices

26 points by fcukdigg 14y ago

qompiler 14y ago
This is how people react to being recorded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDumyGJdLrU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDumyGJdLrU Good luck Google!
- fcukdigg 14y ago
  The next decade is going to be interesting if things like Google Glass become the norm.
- abraininavat 14y ago
  If Google put a light on the glasses that lights up whenever the glasses are recording, would you people stop acting like it's a big deal? A wearable computer with a heads-up interface is more than a spy camcorder.
  - bsimpson 14y ago
    Don't they already have that light? In fact, isn't surreptitious recording illegal in jurisdictions like Japan?
- shurcooL 14y ago
  Google Glass has the advantage that you can't tell if it's recording. "Don't worry, I'm not recording a video," they'll say. You can't accuse people of wearing glasses that may or may not record. Similarly, when people use smartphones, they could be recording with the back camera, but people are okay with that. They assume no recording takes place simply because it's the more likely situation.
  - notatoad 14y ago
    You can't tell if it is recording, except for the red LED on the outside of glass that lights up to tell you when it is recording.
    - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
      Even with a red LED, many people will not recognize Google Glass as a video capturing device. And if this product takes off, what's a person to do if he doesn't want to be recorded and tracked? Imagine sitting in the subway or at Starbucks around 10 Glass users.
      - shurcooL 14y ago
        Just for argument sake, what's the difference between being recorded on video or being watched by someone's eyes? If you don't do anything noteworthy, no one is gonna care to re-watch that video. How many hours of youtube videos already go unwatched today?
        Samuel_Michon 14y ago
        I don't think video capture is the problem, it's bigger than that. Google Glass has hardware for not only capturing video (like CCTV does), but also audio, timecode information, and GPS coordinates. All that data combined, linked to the user's Google account, that makes for a data mining wet dream. I wasn't suggesting humans will be looking at all the footage like with CCTV monitoring, Google has millions of servers to do that. It already analyzes the content of each and every YouTube video -- it provides automatic closed captioning, translations, it recognizes soundtrack and links to music stores, it displays ads depending on the video content, etc etc.
        shurcooL 14y ago
        All right, I hear you. If the concern is that there will be automated algorithms looking through the video/GPS/etc. data, that is way more plausible of a concern. So let's suppose the best case scenario for Google. Suppose they have all the access to 24/7 video, GPS data, facial tracking, etc. basically as much information as can potentially be gathered. And suppose they have all the computational power needed to process it in any realistic way they desire. Can you suggest in what ways that might be bad for me? So perhaps Google can target me with the most relevant ads out of all ads. Is that a bad thing? I wouldn't mind seeing relevant ads rather than irrelevant ones anyway. But what other hypothetical problems could come out of this? I can imagine if I were a criminal and tried to hide something from others, then this would be a concern. But suppose I don't have much to hide, only personal private stuff (which, if exposed, wouldn't be much different from any other person's personal private stuff). I'm interested in hearing what people have to say about this.
aviraldg 14y ago
I don't think this is creepy at all - in fact, this is how human vision works. Besides, the fact that the article's on a website called "Macgasm" doesn't lend much credence to the opinions expressed in it.
- beatpanda 14y ago
  When I notice a stranger wearing a certain brand of shirt I don't walk up to them and start asking them if they want to buy an array of similar shirts from me and whip out a credit card reader. In what way is this "how human vision works"?
  - aviraldg 14y ago
    Google has explicitly stated that they do not intend to, and will not use Glass for advertising. This feature is similar to "Find My Friends" and is clearly opt-in (as it requires prior training) -- have you even read the article?
    - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
      "Google has explicitly stated that they do not intend to, and will not use Glass for advertising." If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. Google makes its money with advertising. Its products exist in order to gather information about you and your environment, so that it can more effectively manipulate you to buy its clients' products, services or ideas. Glass is linked to your Google account. The device has GPS, a camera and a microphone. Everything you capture, send and share goes through Google and will be of great interest to them. EDIT: I searched for a Google statement, the only one I could find is from last year, when the Google Glass lead said "there are no plans to display advertisements through Glass “at the moment."
- micampe 14y ago
  > Besides, the fact that the article's on a website called "Macgasm" doesn't lend much credence to the opinions expressed in it. This shows your bias as much as it does the website's. Also, opinions are not to be believed, you agree or disagree with them, both are options.
ajross 14y ago
I understand the sentiment, but not really the direction of it. Why is Google Glass special here? We spend most of our public lives on CCTV already (seriously, we really do). Why is it more upsetting that normal people have access to this now instead of restaurants and stores and workplaces and public venues and... I'm not saying there's no privacy issue here. I'm saying this ship has sailed. Why pick on Google and not your local convenience store?
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  I believe you're invoking the fallacy of grey here. The Sophisticate: "The world isn't black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else." The Zetet: "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view..."
  - ajross 14y ago
    You've completely lost me here. Are you arguing that Google is grayer than 7/11? Can we have that argument instead, please?
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  The big thing will be because CCTV is used (generally) to record video and store it for X months until it's taped over by the store, Google on the other hand is a datavore and will quite happily use the information in a completely different way to CCTV.
  - ajross 14y ago
    CCTV is (and has been!) subject to virtually every abuse I can imagine Google Glass being used for. Glass will "generally" not be used for privacy invasion either, so I don't see how this logic works. (And the "won't be stored" point seems silly given that you can trivially store a surveillance camera record...). Obviously both can be abused. So why the one-sided outrage?
eksith 14y ago
"dug up by New Scientist" I'm sorry, is this the same New Scientist that suggested (arguably hyped) a piece of technology that has no hope of working in the real world as a plausible replacement for other modes of transportation? OK, just thought I'd clear that up. Thanks for playing... next. Note, for context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#New_Scientist_article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#New_Scientist_article This is no different than Google's "Try these too" feature when browsing for images. When you're digging into NS for panic fodder, you know you're desperate. You know what else is creepy, follows us around, but we all take for granted? Voice recognition.
abraininavat 14y ago
macgasm.net, huh? They'll think it's creepy until Apple comes out with the iGlasses five years later, and then it'll be revolutionary.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  You do understand the reason most people think it's creepy isn't necessarily that it's recording, but that it's recording and sending video to a company who's had so many run in's with privacy laws and wants to store as much information on a person as possible? Right? Not everything is about Apple vs Google.
  - abraininavat 14y ago
    Oh, I'm sorry, I should have attributed a higher level of journalistic integrity to a site called macgasm.net
    - fcukdigg 14y ago
      you must read a lot of their work to know what level of 'journalistic integrity' the site operates on...
    - nicholassmith 14y ago
      Why's the name a problem? Aside from assuming it's a witty zing from an Apple loving fanboy that Google's new product is doomed, I can think of quite a few other sources that have been discussing Glass in terms of privacy in the same terms. Not everyone who likes Apple products hates Google, and vice versa.
beatpanda 14y ago
Who's working on technology like this, and why? And why isn't it self-evidently bad to the people working on it? I think a code of professional ethics around software engineering is long past due. Journalists started doing this in the 20s[1] after a series of events, including the Spanish-American war, made the awful potential of ethical lapses in journalism obvious to everyone.[2] We can't continue to maintain the reflexive belief that technology is neutral and is only dangerous depending on how it's used. At some point people have to be willing to refuse to work on certain things because of the obvious social implications those things would have. I don't know how anybody could be working on things like lethal drones, facial recognition, locked bootloaders, deep packet inspection, or other freedom-reducing technology without considering the consequences of their work. And I recognize that not everybody thinks the technologies I mentioned above are categorically wrong, but it'd be cool to start a conversation to draw lines about what is. 1. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp 2. Spare me, I know the profession isn't perfect and ethical lapses still abound, but at least we have some way of knowing when an ethical standard has been broken.
- eloisius 14y ago
  What's wrong with facial recognition? It has numerous positive uses. Automatically annotating family photo albums being one, trivial example. Even "lethal" drones--it's not like there's one software developer who makes LethalDrone OS. There are many components to it that have very positive possibilities, for example auto stabilizing flight controls, which can and will end up being used in search and rescue drones.
  - beatpanda 14y ago
    And you're telling me at no point did any software engineer write the code that allows the pilot to fire a gun, or do calculations to account for the impact of "kickback" from firing a projectile on a drone's flight path, or...
    - eloisius 14y ago
      Sure, they probably did and I'm not trying to argue that it's impossible to use technology for evil. In fact, I'm someone who has protested and left a project because of the ethical implications it posed. My position, and the only point I'm trying to make is that these technologies aren't themselves sinister. It's their uses that we need to cast light on. Saying that no one really "needs" facial recognition or photo tagging is obvious. For that matter, no one needs an iPhone, or a computer, or the internet, or books. But, it does open up new possibilities to have those technologies to work for us. Before now, there's no practical way you could query your family photo album for all photos of aunt Beulah from 1994-1998. Is it needed? No. But neither is having any recollection of your relatives. I'd be interested in seeing what kind of criteria you can come up with for dichotomizing good and bad technology purely on technical grounds. That is, without taking into account usage and motivations for usage. I mean that sincerely and not jest. I do agree with you that there should be some sort of "guild ethics" we adhere to, but not that we should ostracize certain technologies. We should refuse to work on certain projects or for certain organizations when we know they will be used for wrong. Firewall technology? Good. Great Firewall of China? Bad.
JonnieCache 14y ago
Maybe in the future there will be communities set up in secluded locations where stuff like this is banned. I'd love to live in a small town where everything from mobile phones onwards had to be left at the gate. Of course you then have all the usual monocultural problems with gated communities. Like people have said, we're already all watched by CCTV anyway, especially here, so if I really cared I'd be looking for that community already.
bsimpson 14y ago
I feel like Google is losing a PR war around Glass, almost as badly as Adobe lost its around Flash. Glass will probably be adopted among adventure sports enthusiasts and niches of skilled laborers, but if they want to see them become accepted in everyday life, they need to do a better job assuaging people's concerns around privacy, fashionability, and information addiction.
yardie 14y ago
As an expat living in France I just discovered this thing called "droit d'image." I wonder how Google is going to reconcile their glasses with people's right to privacy (or right to not be recognizably recorded) in public. It's one thing to drive a few hundred Map cars around and scrub the images. It will be something else when thousands of these are deployed and everyone on the other side of the glass will need to have consent.
- s_baby 14y ago
  Question is how is France going to reconcile being stuck in the 20th century?

26 points by fcukdigg 14y ago

This is how people react to being recorded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDumyGJdLrU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDumyGJdLrU Good luck Google!

fcukdigg 14y ago
The next decade is going to be interesting if things like Google Glass become the norm.
abraininavat 14y ago
If Google put a light on the glasses that lights up whenever the glasses are recording, would you people stop acting like it's a big deal? A wearable computer with a heads-up interface is more than a spy camcorder.
- bsimpson 14y ago
  Don't they already have that light? In fact, isn't surreptitious recording illegal in jurisdictions like Japan?
shurcooL 14y ago
Google Glass has the advantage that you can't tell if it's recording. "Don't worry, I'm not recording a video," they'll say. You can't accuse people of wearing glasses that may or may not record. Similarly, when people use smartphones, they could be recording with the back camera, but people are okay with that. They assume no recording takes place simply because it's the more likely situation.
- notatoad 14y ago
  You can't tell if it is recording, except for the red LED on the outside of glass that lights up to tell you when it is recording.
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    Even with a red LED, many people will not recognize Google Glass as a video capturing device. And if this product takes off, what's a person to do if he doesn't want to be recorded and tracked? Imagine sitting in the subway or at Starbucks around 10 Glass users.
    - shurcooL 14y ago
      Just for argument sake, what's the difference between being recorded on video or being watched by someone's eyes? If you don't do anything noteworthy, no one is gonna care to re-watch that video. How many hours of youtube videos already go unwatched today?
      - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
        I don't think video capture is the problem, it's bigger than that. Google Glass has hardware for not only capturing video (like CCTV does), but also audio, timecode information, and GPS coordinates. All that data combined, linked to the user's Google account, that makes for a data mining wet dream. I wasn't suggesting humans will be looking at all the footage like with CCTV monitoring, Google has millions of servers to do that. It already analyzes the content of each and every YouTube video -- it provides automatic closed captioning, translations, it recognizes soundtrack and links to music stores, it displays ads depending on the video content, etc etc.
        shurcooL 14y ago
        All right, I hear you. If the concern is that there will be automated algorithms looking through the video/GPS/etc. data, that is way more plausible of a concern. So let's suppose the best case scenario for Google. Suppose they have all the access to 24/7 video, GPS data, facial tracking, etc. basically as much information as can potentially be gathered. And suppose they have all the computational power needed to process it in any realistic way they desire. Can you suggest in what ways that might be bad for me? So perhaps Google can target me with the most relevant ads out of all ads. Is that a bad thing? I wouldn't mind seeing relevant ads rather than irrelevant ones anyway. But what other hypothetical problems could come out of this? I can imagine if I were a criminal and tried to hide something from others, then this would be a concern. But suppose I don't have much to hide, only personal private stuff (which, if exposed, wouldn't be much different from any other person's personal private stuff). I'm interested in hearing what people have to say about this.

aviraldg 14y ago

I don't think this is creepy at all - in fact, this is how human vision works. Besides, the fact that the article's on a website called "Macgasm" doesn't lend much credence to the opinions expressed in it.

beatpanda 14y ago
When I notice a stranger wearing a certain brand of shirt I don't walk up to them and start asking them if they want to buy an array of similar shirts from me and whip out a credit card reader. In what way is this "how human vision works"?
- aviraldg 14y ago
  Google has explicitly stated that they do not intend to, and will not use Glass for advertising. This feature is similar to "Find My Friends" and is clearly opt-in (as it requires prior training) -- have you even read the article?
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    "Google has explicitly stated that they do not intend to, and will not use Glass for advertising." If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. Google makes its money with advertising. Its products exist in order to gather information about you and your environment, so that it can more effectively manipulate you to buy its clients' products, services or ideas. Glass is linked to your Google account. The device has GPS, a camera and a microphone. Everything you capture, send and share goes through Google and will be of great interest to them. EDIT: I searched for a Google statement, the only one I could find is from last year, when the Google Glass lead said "there are no plans to display advertisements through Glass “at the moment."
micampe 14y ago
> Besides, the fact that the article's on a website called "Macgasm" doesn't lend much credence to the opinions expressed in it. This shows your bias as much as it does the website's. Also, opinions are not to be believed, you agree or disagree with them, both are options.

ajross 14y ago

I understand the sentiment, but not really the direction of it. Why is Google Glass special here? We spend most of our public lives on CCTV already (seriously, we really do). Why is it more upsetting that normal people have access to this now instead of restaurants and stores and workplaces and public venues and... I'm not saying there's no privacy issue here. I'm saying this ship has sailed. Why pick on Google and not your local convenience store?

recoiledsnake 14y ago
I believe you're invoking the fallacy of grey here. The Sophisticate: "The world isn't black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else." The Zetet: "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view..."
- ajross 14y ago
  You've completely lost me here. Are you arguing that Google is grayer than 7/11? Can we have that argument instead, please?
nicholassmith 14y ago
The big thing will be because CCTV is used (generally) to record video and store it for X months until it's taped over by the store, Google on the other hand is a datavore and will quite happily use the information in a completely different way to CCTV.
- ajross 14y ago
  CCTV is (and has been!) subject to virtually every abuse I can imagine Google Glass being used for. Glass will "generally" not be used for privacy invasion either, so I don't see how this logic works. (And the "won't be stored" point seems silly given that you can trivially store a surveillance camera record...). Obviously both can be abused. So why the one-sided outrage?

eksith 14y ago

"dug up by New Scientist" I'm sorry, is this the same New Scientist that suggested (arguably hyped) a piece of technology that has no hope of working in the real world as a plausible replacement for other modes of transportation? OK, just thought I'd clear that up. Thanks for playing... next. Note, for context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#New_Scientist_article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#New_Scientist_article This is no different than Google's "Try these too" feature when browsing for images. When you're digging into NS for panic fodder, you know you're desperate. You know what else is creepy, follows us around, but we all take for granted? Voice recognition.

abraininavat 14y ago

macgasm.net, huh? They'll think it's creepy until Apple comes out with the iGlasses five years later, and then it'll be revolutionary.

nicholassmith 14y ago
You do understand the reason most people think it's creepy isn't necessarily that it's recording, but that it's recording and sending video to a company who's had so many run in's with privacy laws and wants to store as much information on a person as possible? Right? Not everything is about Apple vs Google.
- abraininavat 14y ago
  Oh, I'm sorry, I should have attributed a higher level of journalistic integrity to a site called macgasm.net
  - fcukdigg 14y ago
    you must read a lot of their work to know what level of 'journalistic integrity' the site operates on...
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    Why's the name a problem? Aside from assuming it's a witty zing from an Apple loving fanboy that Google's new product is doomed, I can think of quite a few other sources that have been discussing Glass in terms of privacy in the same terms. Not everyone who likes Apple products hates Google, and vice versa.

beatpanda 14y ago

Who's working on technology like this, and why? And why isn't it self-evidently bad to the people working on it? I think a code of professional ethics around software engineering is long past due. Journalists started doing this in the 20s[1] after a series of events, including the Spanish-American war, made the awful potential of ethical lapses in journalism obvious to everyone.[2] We can't continue to maintain the reflexive belief that technology is neutral and is only dangerous depending on how it's used. At some point people have to be willing to refuse to work on certain things because of the obvious social implications those things would have. I don't know how anybody could be working on things like lethal drones, facial recognition, locked bootloaders, deep packet inspection, or other freedom-reducing technology without considering the consequences of their work. And I recognize that not everybody thinks the technologies I mentioned above are categorically wrong, but it'd be cool to start a conversation to draw lines about what is. 1. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp 2. Spare me, I know the profession isn't perfect and ethical lapses still abound, but at least we have some way of knowing when an ethical standard has been broken.

eloisius 14y ago
What's wrong with facial recognition? It has numerous positive uses. Automatically annotating family photo albums being one, trivial example. Even "lethal" drones--it's not like there's one software developer who makes LethalDrone OS. There are many components to it that have very positive possibilities, for example auto stabilizing flight controls, which can and will end up being used in search and rescue drones.
- beatpanda 14y ago
  And you're telling me at no point did any software engineer write the code that allows the pilot to fire a gun, or do calculations to account for the impact of "kickback" from firing a projectile on a drone's flight path, or...
  - eloisius 14y ago
    Sure, they probably did and I'm not trying to argue that it's impossible to use technology for evil. In fact, I'm someone who has protested and left a project because of the ethical implications it posed. My position, and the only point I'm trying to make is that these technologies aren't themselves sinister. It's their uses that we need to cast light on. Saying that no one really "needs" facial recognition or photo tagging is obvious. For that matter, no one needs an iPhone, or a computer, or the internet, or books. But, it does open up new possibilities to have those technologies to work for us. Before now, there's no practical way you could query your family photo album for all photos of aunt Beulah from 1994-1998. Is it needed? No. But neither is having any recollection of your relatives. I'd be interested in seeing what kind of criteria you can come up with for dichotomizing good and bad technology purely on technical grounds. That is, without taking into account usage and motivations for usage. I mean that sincerely and not jest. I do agree with you that there should be some sort of "guild ethics" we adhere to, but not that we should ostracize certain technologies. We should refuse to work on certain projects or for certain organizations when we know they will be used for wrong. Firewall technology? Good. Great Firewall of China? Bad.

JonnieCache 14y ago

Maybe in the future there will be communities set up in secluded locations where stuff like this is banned. I'd love to live in a small town where everything from mobile phones onwards had to be left at the gate. Of course you then have all the usual monocultural problems with gated communities. Like people have said, we're already all watched by CCTV anyway, especially here, so if I really cared I'd be looking for that community already.

bsimpson 14y ago

I feel like Google is losing a PR war around Glass, almost as badly as Adobe lost its around Flash. Glass will probably be adopted among adventure sports enthusiasts and niches of skilled laborers, but if they want to see them become accepted in everyday life, they need to do a better job assuaging people's concerns around privacy, fashionability, and information addiction.

yardie 14y ago

As an expat living in France I just discovered this thing called "droit d'image." I wonder how Google is going to reconcile their glasses with people's right to privacy (or right to not be recognizably recorded) in public. It's one thing to drive a few hundred Map cars around and scrub the images. It will be something else when thousands of these are deployed and everyone on the other side of the glass will need to have consent.

s_baby 14y ago
Question is how is France going to reconcile being stuck in the 20th century?