There are video cameras all over that bar recording everything.
If he means security cameras, he’s wrong: those aren’t being streamed to the public. If he means individuals’ smartphone cameras, those aren’t tied to people’s gazes. We should give the stink eye to anybody waving any camera around the bar willy-nilly, and we should say something if it isn’t put away pretty quickly. It’s one thing to take a snapshot, but it’s another to record video wherever you’re glancing and with no way for people to tell if you’re just glancing or recording. Glass breaks EVERY convention about recording video by masking the camera and tying it to a person’s head.
I also take exception because as a glasses wearer, I don’t want anybody to think that I have anything but an analog optical device on my face.
What about them holding up a smart phone? Or a camcorder?
I would definitely not find anything strange about someone recording their own children in a park or playground. I don’t buy the “Think of the children” play when there is already so much recording of children going on. (Search YouTube for ‘child playground’ to see just what has been posted, who knows how much has been filmed and not posted.)
While I would find it very strange to be on a date with someone that had their smart phone or camcorder in front of them, it wouldn’t be for privacy reasons. It’s more about the lack of attention it implies, on a date I expect both people to be focused on the other, and not on a phone, recording or not.
If were talking about a performance it depends a lot on they type of performance. For a loud flashy rock concert I could care less. For a play or a symphony or similar the guy that just can’t stop responding to text messages is just as distracting as some one recording. Again, not a privacy issue to me.
I keep failing to see what the ‘Google Glass’ problem is, in almost every case I hear as an objection it’s either a case where the social norms already tell us to put away the recording device, in which case I have no problem with society expecting that a Glass wearer would take them off. Or it’s a case where we already accept other equally invasive recording, but there is just something ‘weird’ about glass. Which is just a rehash of every notable tech advance for the last 50 years (or longer). Hey remember when we had laws that camera phones had to play a loud click sound as they took a picture, and there couldn’t be a way to turn it off? Yeah, now most smart phones in silent are perfectly happy to disable that click sound.
Maybe the well off white dude shouldnt have been telling anyone how to feel about their own privacy?
“Google is a tech leader and innovator, some of our products lead the world markets, and some of our products we need more consumer input so we can continue to refine them… this is the nature of any innovative business.”
Well off white dudes don’t have to worry about a lot in life. They’re on top of the heap, especially if they’re straight (and I’m saying this as a straight, white, male tech worker). If you’re on top, you don’t have to be concerned with privacy, perception, and rights the way, say, a Black lesbian does, or with perceptions because you won’t really be impacted much at all.
That’s the root of those comments. “Oh, the most privileged dude you’ll ever meet isn’t concerned about his privacy. Surprise!”
I think they could have anticipated a negative reaction to putting a camera on someone’s face with the capability to record all social interactions from the other parties in those interactions. The visceral reaction from folks was pretty obvious and immediate. I felt it and I love stupid technology. I don’t want every person I’m talking to in a cafe to be inherently recording our ever interaction though and that’s what it felt like.
That’s true, google glass users seemed like haughty outsiders, so it was pretty easy to be upset with the product.
Yeah, but this just goes to the psychological issues around filming. Of course people film their own children playing at parks all the time, but if a man stood at the edge of a playground pointing a camera at it, there is a serious chance that someone would call the cops. Pulling out a camera and specifically following the actions of your own child for a short time: 100% normal. Filming children who aren’t your own or being there when you don’t have your own child there: assumption you are a sex offender. There are unspoken rules that everyone has to obey, and with Glass people didn’t know whether you were following them or not.
You can’t even talk to a child not your own anymore without someone halfway acting as it you’re a pedophile.
As a parent of a girl who is 19 next week, I tend to naturally say “hi” to kids when I run into them at a cafe, playing in the neighborhood, etc. just because of, I dunno, being paternally wired now. These days, I won’t even say more than a “hello” if I don’t see a parent hovering about for fear that someone will think I’m trying to kidnap a kid or poison them or something.
I suspect that the difference(at least for people who are actually OK with CCTV, rather than merely helpless to do much of anything about it) is the widespread assumption(sometimes accurate, sometimes deeply false) that most surveillance video just gets dumped to tape as part of some location’s CYA/insurance requirements and eventually taped over without comment, while the guy with the camera on his head is fairly clearly demonstrating that at least one human, and very possibly his youtube channel, are interested in the output of the camera(it doesn’t help that he’s not only interested, so is some nameless ‘loss prevention professional’ who is behind the cameras in the store; but willing to personally display the fact, rather than hiding behind an institutional facade).
The case with the (also common, also superior) cellphone cameras is also a bit different: it is certainly possible to be sneaky with those, with some practice and a little dexterity; but in normal use a cellphone provides clear cues about what the user is doing: ‘in pocket’, ‘on table putzing idly’, ‘on table, looking but not touching’, ‘raised for photo’, raised and held for video’, etc. A camera strapped to your face may not be on all the time(and this one isn’t, since the battery sucked); but it spends 100% of its time in a pose indistinguishable from ‘ready and active’. If you brandished your phone in the same way, all the time, you probably wouldn’t make too many friends either.
Oh! I dont mean to sound insensitive, Im firmly in the camp to over throw the well off white dudes. But I kind of agree with him on this point… he works for a company where people willingly hand over their personal data and daily routine as fast as they can get it to them, he knows first hand how much privacy people are willing to give up… its practically at the “shut up and take my money” level. But suddenly the walking, talking, consuming, megalomaniac, pie chart people are going to cry foul over a camera? I can see why he would have been surprised by this unexpected outlash. But how he decided to handle it publicly is where he went wrong.
It’s completely ridiculous. I was in the playground and there was a little boy and his older sister there. The boy was maybe 2 and a half, the sister probably seven or eight. She helped him get into the little kid’s swing and pushed him a few times, but then between the two of them they couldn’t get him out. So there is a toddler in a swing who is trapped and can’t get out and is yelling, “Help! Help!” and what am I doing? Standing five feet away looking around to see where a parent is because it’s totally socially unacceptable for me to help a two-year-old in distress.
If I hadn’t spotted one of their parents for a minute I probably would have snapped and helped, but the extent to which I did hesitate really showed how much I’ve internalized fear of other people being angry at me for interacting with their kids.
Which is creepy (and I guess off-topic) because when I was between 6 and 10, for example, I knew a lot of adults in my neighborhoods, at the library, in the park as regulars, etc. because I was out and about and a friendly kid. Adults had no problems interacting with me (and other kids) and as long as they weren’t trying to lure me into a van with eyebolts in the floor, I wasn’t worried either. I didn’t meet a creeper adult until I was 16.
If you’ve been following wearable computers for the past 15 years or so, you might find the price of the Glass decent enough. This sort of thing around 2000 would run you $10k-15k and be far more limited. The overreaction also seems weird for those who have been using these technologies for years with no backlash.
It seems remarkable that Google abandoned Glass without trying something simple like a visible “Recording” LED or a retractable lens cover or something to make it clear when the camera was in use and when it was not.
Make the screen stereo/3d and see-through. Keep the camera, increase resolution, add depth sensing for 3d vision for gesture recognition, to allow for grasping and manipulating of virtual objects in the AR overlays. Use higher resolution for tracking QR-code like markers for AR overlays, and for recognizing real objects for similar overlays.
And add a lot of processing power and memory so speech recog and face recog can be done locally without having to send data into The Cloud.
I am waiting for this tech for almost three decades.
From what I read, Google intended to put a “recording” LED on the release version. But apparently, their feedback was so negative that many dismissed the LED option claiming that there’d be an app to disable it within a week anyway.
I have a feeling that if a man stood a the edge of a playground watching the children without having any of children of his own then there is a good chance someone would call the cops. Google Glass may and some uncertainty, is this a creeper or a creeper with a camera?, but the problem exists with our without Glass.
The unspoken rules are called Social Norms, we once didn’t have social norms for camcorders, then camera phones, then smart phones. At some point we as a society will need to establish the norms for semi-obtrusive wearable cameras. I don’t think the failure of Google Glass will be the end of this type of product, so at some point norms will develop or adapt.
Thing is, I can be much more covert about filming with my phone than anyone possibly could be with glass. Glass, you need to actually stare at your subject, give verbal commands, fiddle with the thing to record; the eyepiece will be on as well so with the exceptions of bright outdoors areas, you will see the screen on. On the other hand, I can just be “sorta playing with my phone” and recording someone fairly well (may not be perfect, but it would do the job). There are even ways to make your phone record video with the screen off.
If anyone were to want to covertly record someone, it’d be better to get a $100 lapel camera, or a $200 pair of frames with a pinhole camera in them. No one would be the wiser.
