How many times have you been recorded today? Well, that you are aware of? Intersection cameras, convenience stores, sidewalk cafes, banks, not to mention the ever-present camera/recorders in everyone’s hands. Privacy is dead, get over it.
 
Everything is being networked. There is Gait recognition software good enough that they don’t really need to see your face, 1.8 giga-pixel cameras mounted on drones that can recognize people flipping the bird at 15, 000 feet and the NSA is erecting a ‘Person if Interest’-esque data center right here in our own backyard. Yep, even before Google Glass came along, the capability to secretly take pictures, video or audio from someone without their knowledge has been going on for many years.
 
Insert moral panic here: Google glass is already being banned months before its launch (I.E. Seattle’s 5 Point Café).

IMO, Railing against Glass because someone might be recording you is kind of like railing against airplanes because someone might hijack one and fly it into the World Trade Center. All this worried talk by people afraid of how others might use Google Glass reminds me of the mid to late nineties, where everybody was terrified that the internet would lead to the world getting taken over by hackers. Society found ways to deal with it, and the world kept right on chugging along. It will be the same with Glass. There will be a period of about three to five years where people are just getting used to others wearing the device (like the implementation of pagers, cell phones or Bluetooth). No one knows you. No one cares. You are background noise.
 
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has been quoted saying “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time’.  And while some might see it as the prophecy of ‘1984’ coming to pass, I tend to think of it more as immortality redefined.
 
Already there are children who have had nearly every significant (and many more insignificant) hours of their lives documented in one form or another, at increasingly high quality. Hardware is getting faster; software is getting better day-to-day. 

I barely remember a few moments of my life prior to the age of eight. These people will be able to call up more and more of their own, to the point where a child born tomorrow can reasonably expect to have hundreds of thousands of hours of video and they will be able to witness their own development as human beings at an unprecedented level of detail.

I wonder what effect that level of enforced self-awareness will have on future societies. Honestly, by 2020 I don’t reckon any of us should ever expect any amount of privacy outside of designated Faraday cages. And no, putting on Google Glass does not make you a cyborg any more than wearing a Nintendo Power Glove does.

One thing is for sure; an arms race is just beginning between those who want complete transparency in society, and those who want to maintain their privacy in certain circumstances…even when there’s considerable overlap between those two groups. Like many, I find myself within that overlap.

-Dagobot
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