6 ms·

> AR doesn't significantly augment your experience of riding the bus to work, ordering dinner at a restaurant, taking a walk around the block, or even most form

> AR doesn't significantly augment your experience of riding the bus to work, ordering dinner at a restaurant, taking a walk around the block, or even most forms of labor (manual or otherwise). It could. Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. Ordering dinner? It could approximate calorie counts of the food on your plate. Taking a walk? It could pull up information about the flora and fauna around you, and the history of the buildings. AR could be amazing, but the tech isn't there yet. Google Glass reminds me of Apple Newton -- an amazing piece of technology that's a decade or two too early.

GuiA 12y ago
> Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. Jesus Christ please no. Does anyone really think this is a good idea? Addendum: of all the people replying to my post, saying how great it could be, I'd be willing to guess that none are in positions where they get harassed on the bus on an almost daily basis (eg being a woman).
- rwallace 12y ago
  You seem to be implying that being able to know the identity of the person you're looking at will cause women to be harassed. But in small communities, everyone already has this feature (by virtue of their being few enough people that an unaided human brain can track them all). And in small communities, you don't get a lot of jerks going around randomly harassing women on a daily basis. Why not? Well, the identity of the jerk who does the harassing is also known, and social (and ultimately physical) sanctions will be applied. Now you're saying that in a large community where people are anonymous, there are jerks going around harassing women on a daily basis. But that's in a large community without identity tracking, where the jerks don't fear reprisal. So what you're saying is actually an argument in favor of implementing AR identity tracking and letting human capabilities catch up with community size.
- sp332 12y ago
  Like their twitter bio, not a dossier. Well I mean you could but that's a different thing.
  - steve-howard 12y ago
    Even so, most of the time when I'm out in public I like to be anonymous. Since I'm not famous, that is extremely easy, and I like it that way.
    - sp332 12y ago
      That works in some places I guess. In some towns, either everyone is going to know you or you're going to attract attention as a stranger.
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    Yeah but I still can't imagine why I'd want to know the Twitter bio of the people around me. It's a bus/train/supermarket/DMV line, not a mixer. If it were a mixer I'd also be more interested in talking to the person than reading their profile and recent tweets. I get how such technology would be impressive from a "oooooh cyberspace!" perspective, but that only reinforce's the point made earlier: Google Glass was very impressive tech that had a lot of technically interesting applications that were nonetheless mostly pointless.
- kbenson 12y ago
  You are assuming a context which is negative for you. It may be there are ways, with sufficient settings opted in for both parties, where this may be a good thing. Finding out that person in front of you is someone you've corresponded with, or have a strong n+1 contact with through a co-worker or friend may be useful and wanted in some instances. For example, you're at a party/mixer, so you set your locality privacy settings to show your name to those in proximity, or to those in proximity that you have a direct or once removed connection to through Facebook or G+. Another example, you are at a conference, so you set the locality privacy filter to show your name, location, and workplace to anyone in your work address book that happens to be close by. Finally, imagine you are on the bus, going to your good friend's house, who you've set to always see you when within a mile or so. You see a marker for her/him show up in the distance, rapidly approach, and pass you going in the other direction. You realize they misunderstood your prior conversation about meeting, and are on their way to your house, or at least, were, until they realized you were on the bus they just passed and turned around to pick you up at the next stop, which you've quickly agreed to get off at. I think there are cases where capabilities like this could be extremely useful and desired, it's just a matter of working out the issues. This, and a thousand other uses, are what people mean when they say "It could" with respect to AR enhancing our everyday life.
  - Delmania 12y ago
    Of all your examples, the conference one is probably the only time such a feature could be useful. Every other example you've raised has a low tech alternative: just talk to people. I realize many people have a tendency to fear small talk, but it's an incredibly useful skill to have.
  - jellicle 12y ago
    But if you have to wait for others to opt-in, your system will never take off. So it must must must be opt-out - scrape as much data as you can from Facebook or Twitter or driver's license photos or whatever. There's just no chance at all that this could be an opt-in system. It cannot work. When the government does facial recognition, they're not asking you to opt-in to being facially recognized... why do you think that is? When the police deploy license plate scanners, they don't ask you to opt-in and provide data, why do you think that is? Literally the first app developed on a system like this would be something to "look up and stalk hot girls you see everyday".
- 0xDOOD 12y ago
  I can guarantee there are at least a dozen potential startups in this idea alone. Imagine some version of Linkedin or OKCupid, or even some general purpose scraper that correlates identities and social media accounts through facial recognition and online photos. Even better, facial recognition plus a decent method of determining height, weight and ethinicity, and you have an x-ray specs app. The first person to make that work is probably going to be a millionaire.
  - PhantomGremlin 12y ago
    > The first person to make that work is probably going to be a millionaire. Perhaps billionaire, unless the current startup bubble bursts first. Let's see: LinkedIn -- get an idea of income via job category Tinder -- hmmm, someone "looking for love" Uber "walk of shame" -- someone not just looking I'll stop now. The possibilities are way too creepy for me. But there will be plenty of narcissistic hipsters who see nothing wrong with any of that.
- 1ris 12y ago
  In Japan I believe it's a legal requirement for cameras to emulate a shutter sound for privacy reasons. I want that, too. Oh, and I that my consent is required before somebody does face recognition on me.
  - mattm 12y ago
    Yet, video recording does not make any sound on phones.
  - alexbecker 12y ago
    And I want my consent required every time someone who overhears my name digs up my facebook. It's not even remotely enforceable. For better or worse, this is the future.
    - 1ris 12y ago
      There is a huge difference there. First of all, I don't have facebook, and I barely use my real name on the internet. So I can defend against that. And second, my name is absolutely not unique and if needed I can adopt other identities. My face is and i can't get a new one.
      - alexbecker 12y ago
        Many people do, and it's an inescapable part of their social life. And it is quite easy to narrow down results based on location, even if you have a relatively common name. Which many people don't; for example I know of only one Mozaffar Qizilbash and some extensive googling hasn't turned up another. But this specific example isn't the point. My point is that as information becomes more widely available and integrated in our lives, there will be plenty of ways to find out plenty of stuff about all but the most cautious hermits. Trying to plug every hole just isn't practical.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        Do you wear a mask when walking down the street? Do you ask people to sign a document if you want them to see your face? There is always a way to abuse anything, and at some point we need to address it on a societal level, and not by blocking technological progress.
- twsted 12y ago
  Do not worry, there will be a do-not-track option... uh oh, never mind.
- declan 12y ago
  Whether auto-face recognition is a good idea or not, it's going to happen as the trends we all know and love continue. Even if major tech companies don't build this in to their camera-enabled products, open source projects will using distributed datasets. Or perhaps not-so-distributed datasets: face recognition systems use only something like 70-80 nodal points that give you internodal distances like eye spacing, mouth width, etc. (I may be wrong on that number; if I am I'm sure someone who works in this area will correct me.) If this happens, I suspect it will change human interaction significantly and make it more different to be casually anonymous. I'm not so worried about people I casually interact learning my identity; I'd be more concerned about cradle-to-grave government collection and permanent storage of these records, coupled with license plate scanners, etc.
  - sabalaba 12y ago
    Yea, so at Lambda, depending on the application, we use either convolutional neural networks or layered neural networks initialized with unsupervised training using autoencoders to do the feature extraction from images. The features are either passed through a softmax layer or used as a "siamese" network. (Siamese networks provide a similarity metric as opposed to a probability distribution over labels.[3]) As far as recognition goes, most modern algorithms don't use fiducials (what you call 'nodal points') to do recognition. So there's nothing in our code that has to do with interocular distance or mouth width, etc., so all of the features are "learned". However, fiducials are used to do a frontalization or re-alignment step before passing it through the feature extractor (neural network or otherwise). This type of frontalization step allowed Facebook's deepface algorithm to use locally learned filters for their CNN as opposed to shared weights.[1][2] [1] http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2014/papers/Taigman_DeepFace_Closing_the_2014_CVPR_paper.pdf http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2014/pa... [2] http://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/pdf/YiSun_CVPR14.pdf http://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/pdf/YiSun_CVPR14.pdf [3] http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/chopra-05.pdf http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/chopra-05.pdf
  - drpgq 12y ago
    I'm a research scientist at a face recognition company. From my experience, we don't use internodal distances, we use information from all the pixels.
- birdsareweird 12y ago
  >(eg being a woman) It is amazingly courageous how you manage to go through life with such an inescapable handicap. It must be so hard for you, having to contend with the possibility of encountering strangers and having to deal with them by yourself in a public space. What has the world come to, when such cruelty is not opposed? Something must be done! Now where are all those useless, good-for-nothing men?
  - farrelle25 12y ago
    Dealing with strangers in a public space is often a problem women have to endure. Both my sisters have told me about borderline harassment and/or inappropriate attention they received while going about their daily lives.
    - birdsareweird 12y ago
      No, it's only a problem when it happens to women. When it happens to men, it's called "life", "man up" and "stop being such a pussy".
      - mwfunk 12y ago
        I think I can say with 100% certainty that either you are in a very bad place right now, in which case you have my sympathy, or you are an utterly titanic asshole, in which case you don't.
        birdsareweird 12y ago
        When you have no valid point to make, attack the messenger. Don't project how you feel about my opinion onto me, I'm happy and optimistic that this whole oppression charade is finally coming crashing down.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
steveklabnik 12y ago
> It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. This may be a 'significant augmentation' but it's not sure it's one that I want.
- skizm 12y ago
  Time to start wearing scarves + hoods + sunglasses, watch_dogs style.
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    That may not be sufficient, but if you want anything to work to maintain your anonymity in the future, you have to start now. Recognition technologies currently in development can identify a person by gait, posture, and by face while disguised, turned away from the viewer, or otherwise obscured, albeit with a low probability of success. For now. One of the few countermeasures shown to be effective against the newer recognition systems is "dazzle"-style camouflage. The other is to keep yourself out of any databases used for matching. Obviously, the former looks a bit outlandish for anyone out in public. The paranoid and prepared will start scrubbing their social networks, wearing veils of some sort in public, and intentionally sewing rocks into their shoes now, so that when the technology matures later, they will be a "no match" to the databases already being built right now. Everyone else will screw their eyes shut and scream silently into their own skulls as their lives are pushed ever closer to resembling all the various sci-fi dystopias and utopias, blended and amalgamated into one terrifying and beautiful reality.
psaintla 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
untog 12y ago
But I don't want any of those things. Or, at least, I want that information so infrequently that pulling out my phone is absolutely fine. It's solving a problem that doesn't exist.
- krapp 12y ago
  >It's solving a problem that doesn't exist. Businesses do that all the time. No one ever needs the next big thing, which is why they work so hard to make you want it. What Google wants is to extend the capabilities of G+ into the real world. That's what augmented reality is, with Google behind the wheel. The problem it's meant to solve is the problem of you not generating marketable data while offline. Well, now you need never be offline. Now everything you see and hear is a part of the social layer. Isn't that wonderful?
AceJohnny2 12y ago
> Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. You do realize most people consider that an anti-feature, and is exactly why a lot of people are worried about it, right?
smtddr 12y ago
>>Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. I'm pretty sure this is a good reason NOT to give Glass to the masses.
marincounty 12y ago
I think Google glass biggest problem will be getting sane people to wear them in public. Right now, I wouldn't want to be the guy wearing Google glasses on a S.F. muni bus at any hour other than commute hour. It's just not worth the potential punch in the face. (yes, I think violence is wrong, but I can't control arseholes.) I think the AI factor will be huge once Hackers make their modifications, but, I don't think that's a huge problem now--an hacked Android phone tied to a Rasbery, tethered to a Packet sniffer stuffed into a coat pocket can can gather a fair amount of data? I think the obvious problem with the glasses is a lot of people don't want their picture taken. As a Photographer, five years ago people wanted their picture taken. Now, I don't dare go out and take anyone's picture without their permission--even unintentional inclusion, like snapping a Landscape--I got a dirty look. I'm suprised "Don't take my picture" isn't a bumper sticker?
Htsthbjig 12y ago
"It could. Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you." Google, and hence the NSA and the US of America(thanks to Patriot Act) having the information of who is at every moment at a given bus, restaurant, party in any part of the word.... is kind of creepy to me. With mobile phones they can do it today, but with lots of effort, it draws the battery and I could give my phone to someone else, or leave it on a Faraday box if I want. With cameras pointing to people you have lots of other metadata, like who is kissing or smiling or hugging whom, who is serious with whom. Who is a leader, who is a follower. In essence, it is a spy. It is not amazing, people from secret services regularly kill people from other countries if they consider it worth "national security", like a news reporter that wanted to know too much and know hold information that puts "the country at risk". Talking to people like Arturo Perez Reberte that has been war reporters for decades they tell you very clearly that secret services from the big boys(Russia, US, Israel) have killed some of their friends. Think for a moment how people, specially women preferred to live in cities instead of villages because they were not controlled in everything they did.

GuiA 12y ago

> Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. Jesus Christ please no. Does anyone really think this is a good idea? Addendum: of all the people replying to my post, saying how great it could be, I'd be willing to guess that none are in positions where they get harassed on the bus on an almost daily basis (eg being a woman).

rwallace 12y ago
You seem to be implying that being able to know the identity of the person you're looking at will cause women to be harassed. But in small communities, everyone already has this feature (by virtue of their being few enough people that an unaided human brain can track them all). And in small communities, you don't get a lot of jerks going around randomly harassing women on a daily basis. Why not? Well, the identity of the jerk who does the harassing is also known, and social (and ultimately physical) sanctions will be applied. Now you're saying that in a large community where people are anonymous, there are jerks going around harassing women on a daily basis. But that's in a large community without identity tracking, where the jerks don't fear reprisal. So what you're saying is actually an argument in favor of implementing AR identity tracking and letting human capabilities catch up with community size.
sp332 12y ago
Like their twitter bio, not a dossier. Well I mean you could but that's a different thing.
- steve-howard 12y ago
  Even so, most of the time when I'm out in public I like to be anonymous. Since I'm not famous, that is extremely easy, and I like it that way.
  - sp332 12y ago
    That works in some places I guess. In some towns, either everyone is going to know you or you're going to attract attention as a stranger.
- potatolicious 12y ago
  Yeah but I still can't imagine why I'd want to know the Twitter bio of the people around me. It's a bus/train/supermarket/DMV line, not a mixer. If it were a mixer I'd also be more interested in talking to the person than reading their profile and recent tweets. I get how such technology would be impressive from a "oooooh cyberspace!" perspective, but that only reinforce's the point made earlier: Google Glass was very impressive tech that had a lot of technically interesting applications that were nonetheless mostly pointless.
kbenson 12y ago
You are assuming a context which is negative for you. It may be there are ways, with sufficient settings opted in for both parties, where this may be a good thing. Finding out that person in front of you is someone you've corresponded with, or have a strong n+1 contact with through a co-worker or friend may be useful and wanted in some instances. For example, you're at a party/mixer, so you set your locality privacy settings to show your name to those in proximity, or to those in proximity that you have a direct or once removed connection to through Facebook or G+. Another example, you are at a conference, so you set the locality privacy filter to show your name, location, and workplace to anyone in your work address book that happens to be close by. Finally, imagine you are on the bus, going to your good friend's house, who you've set to always see you when within a mile or so. You see a marker for her/him show up in the distance, rapidly approach, and pass you going in the other direction. You realize they misunderstood your prior conversation about meeting, and are on their way to your house, or at least, were, until they realized you were on the bus they just passed and turned around to pick you up at the next stop, which you've quickly agreed to get off at. I think there are cases where capabilities like this could be extremely useful and desired, it's just a matter of working out the issues. This, and a thousand other uses, are what people mean when they say "It could" with respect to AR enhancing our everyday life.
- Delmania 12y ago
  Of all your examples, the conference one is probably the only time such a feature could be useful. Every other example you've raised has a low tech alternative: just talk to people. I realize many people have a tendency to fear small talk, but it's an incredibly useful skill to have.
- jellicle 12y ago
  But if you have to wait for others to opt-in, your system will never take off. So it must must must be opt-out - scrape as much data as you can from Facebook or Twitter or driver's license photos or whatever. There's just no chance at all that this could be an opt-in system. It cannot work. When the government does facial recognition, they're not asking you to opt-in to being facially recognized... why do you think that is? When the police deploy license plate scanners, they don't ask you to opt-in and provide data, why do you think that is? Literally the first app developed on a system like this would be something to "look up and stalk hot girls you see everyday".
0xDOOD 12y ago
I can guarantee there are at least a dozen potential startups in this idea alone. Imagine some version of Linkedin or OKCupid, or even some general purpose scraper that correlates identities and social media accounts through facial recognition and online photos. Even better, facial recognition plus a decent method of determining height, weight and ethinicity, and you have an x-ray specs app. The first person to make that work is probably going to be a millionaire.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  > The first person to make that work is probably going to be a millionaire. Perhaps billionaire, unless the current startup bubble bursts first. Let's see: LinkedIn -- get an idea of income via job category Tinder -- hmmm, someone "looking for love" Uber "walk of shame" -- someone not just looking I'll stop now. The possibilities are way too creepy for me. But there will be plenty of narcissistic hipsters who see nothing wrong with any of that.
1ris 12y ago
In Japan I believe it's a legal requirement for cameras to emulate a shutter sound for privacy reasons. I want that, too. Oh, and I that my consent is required before somebody does face recognition on me.
- mattm 12y ago
  Yet, video recording does not make any sound on phones.
- alexbecker 12y ago
  And I want my consent required every time someone who overhears my name digs up my facebook. It's not even remotely enforceable. For better or worse, this is the future.
  - 1ris 12y ago
    There is a huge difference there. First of all, I don't have facebook, and I barely use my real name on the internet. So I can defend against that. And second, my name is absolutely not unique and if needed I can adopt other identities. My face is and i can't get a new one.
    - alexbecker 12y ago
      Many people do, and it's an inescapable part of their social life. And it is quite easy to narrow down results based on location, even if you have a relatively common name. Which many people don't; for example I know of only one Mozaffar Qizilbash and some extensive googling hasn't turned up another. But this specific example isn't the point. My point is that as information becomes more widely available and integrated in our lives, there will be plenty of ways to find out plenty of stuff about all but the most cautious hermits. Trying to plug every hole just isn't practical.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Do you wear a mask when walking down the street? Do you ask people to sign a document if you want them to see your face? There is always a way to abuse anything, and at some point we need to address it on a societal level, and not by blocking technological progress.
twsted 12y ago
Do not worry, there will be a do-not-track option... uh oh, never mind.
declan 12y ago
Whether auto-face recognition is a good idea or not, it's going to happen as the trends we all know and love continue. Even if major tech companies don't build this in to their camera-enabled products, open source projects will using distributed datasets. Or perhaps not-so-distributed datasets: face recognition systems use only something like 70-80 nodal points that give you internodal distances like eye spacing, mouth width, etc. (I may be wrong on that number; if I am I'm sure someone who works in this area will correct me.) If this happens, I suspect it will change human interaction significantly and make it more different to be casually anonymous. I'm not so worried about people I casually interact learning my identity; I'd be more concerned about cradle-to-grave government collection and permanent storage of these records, coupled with license plate scanners, etc.
- sabalaba 12y ago
  Yea, so at Lambda, depending on the application, we use either convolutional neural networks or layered neural networks initialized with unsupervised training using autoencoders to do the feature extraction from images. The features are either passed through a softmax layer or used as a "siamese" network. (Siamese networks provide a similarity metric as opposed to a probability distribution over labels.[3]) As far as recognition goes, most modern algorithms don't use fiducials (what you call 'nodal points') to do recognition. So there's nothing in our code that has to do with interocular distance or mouth width, etc., so all of the features are "learned". However, fiducials are used to do a frontalization or re-alignment step before passing it through the feature extractor (neural network or otherwise). This type of frontalization step allowed Facebook's deepface algorithm to use locally learned filters for their CNN as opposed to shared weights.[1][2] [1] http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2014/papers/Taigman_DeepFace_Closing_the_2014_CVPR_paper.pdf http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2014/pa... [2] http://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/pdf/YiSun_CVPR14.pdf http://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/pdf/YiSun_CVPR14.pdf [3] http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/chopra-05.pdf http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/chopra-05.pdf
- drpgq 12y ago
  I'm a research scientist at a face recognition company. From my experience, we don't use internodal distances, we use information from all the pixels.
birdsareweird 12y ago
>(eg being a woman) It is amazingly courageous how you manage to go through life with such an inescapable handicap. It must be so hard for you, having to contend with the possibility of encountering strangers and having to deal with them by yourself in a public space. What has the world come to, when such cruelty is not opposed? Something must be done! Now where are all those useless, good-for-nothing men?
- farrelle25 12y ago
  Dealing with strangers in a public space is often a problem women have to endure. Both my sisters have told me about borderline harassment and/or inappropriate attention they received while going about their daily lives.
  - birdsareweird 12y ago
    No, it's only a problem when it happens to women. When it happens to men, it's called "life", "man up" and "stop being such a pussy".
    - mwfunk 12y ago
      I think I can say with 100% certainty that either you are in a very bad place right now, in which case you have my sympathy, or you are an utterly titanic asshole, in which case you don't.
      - birdsareweird 12y ago
        When you have no valid point to make, attack the messenger. Don't project how you feel about my opinion onto me, I'm happy and optimistic that this whole oppression charade is finally coming crashing down.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

steveklabnik 12y ago

> It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. This may be a 'significant augmentation' but it's not sure it's one that I want.

skizm 12y ago
Time to start wearing scarves + hoods + sunglasses, watch_dogs style.
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  That may not be sufficient, but if you want anything to work to maintain your anonymity in the future, you have to start now. Recognition technologies currently in development can identify a person by gait, posture, and by face while disguised, turned away from the viewer, or otherwise obscured, albeit with a low probability of success. For now. One of the few countermeasures shown to be effective against the newer recognition systems is "dazzle"-style camouflage. The other is to keep yourself out of any databases used for matching. Obviously, the former looks a bit outlandish for anyone out in public. The paranoid and prepared will start scrubbing their social networks, wearing veils of some sort in public, and intentionally sewing rocks into their shoes now, so that when the technology matures later, they will be a "no match" to the databases already being built right now. Everyone else will screw their eyes shut and scream silently into their own skulls as their lives are pushed ever closer to resembling all the various sci-fi dystopias and utopias, blended and amalgamated into one terrifying and beautiful reality.

psaintla 12y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

untog 12y ago

But I don't want any of those things. Or, at least, I want that information so infrequently that pulling out my phone is absolutely fine. It's solving a problem that doesn't exist.

krapp 12y ago
>It's solving a problem that doesn't exist. Businesses do that all the time. No one ever needs the next big thing, which is why they work so hard to make you want it. What Google wants is to extend the capabilities of G+ into the real world. That's what augmented reality is, with Google behind the wheel. The problem it's meant to solve is the problem of you not generating marketable data while offline. Well, now you need never be offline. Now everything you see and hear is a part of the social layer. Isn't that wonderful?

AceJohnny2 12y ago

> Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. You do realize most people consider that an anti-feature, and is exactly why a lot of people are worried about it, right?

smtddr 12y ago

>>Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. I'm pretty sure this is a good reason NOT to give Glass to the masses.

marincounty 12y ago

I think Google glass biggest problem will be getting sane people to wear them in public. Right now, I wouldn't want to be the guy wearing Google glasses on a S.F. muni bus at any hour other than commute hour. It's just not worth the potential punch in the face. (yes, I think violence is wrong, but I can't control arseholes.) I think the AI factor will be huge once Hackers make their modifications, but, I don't think that's a huge problem now--an hacked Android phone tied to a Rasbery, tethered to a Packet sniffer stuffed into a coat pocket can can gather a fair amount of data? I think the obvious problem with the glasses is a lot of people don't want their picture taken. As a Photographer, five years ago people wanted their picture taken. Now, I don't dare go out and take anyone's picture without their permission--even unintentional inclusion, like snapping a Landscape--I got a dirty look. I'm suprised "Don't take my picture" isn't a bumper sticker?

Htsthbjig 12y ago

"It could. Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you." Google, and hence the NSA and the US of America(thanks to Patriot Act) having the information of who is at every moment at a given bus, restaurant, party in any part of the word.... is kind of creepy to me. With mobile phones they can do it today, but with lots of effort, it draws the battery and I could give my phone to someone else, or leave it on a Faraday box if I want. With cameras pointing to people you have lots of other metadata, like who is kissing or smiling or hugging whom, who is serious with whom. Who is a leader, who is a follower. In essence, it is a spy. It is not amazing, people from secret services regularly kill people from other countries if they consider it worth "national security", like a news reporter that wanted to know too much and know hold information that puts "the country at risk". Talking to people like Arturo Perez Reberte that has been war reporters for decades they tell you very clearly that secret services from the big boys(Russia, US, Israel) have killed some of their friends. Think for a moment how people, specially women preferred to live in cities instead of villages because they were not controlled in everything they did.