Three potential pitfalls in the new Google Glass technology

Google might just be changing the world again with its Google Glass product, albeit not in the ways the company expects.

There’s been plenty of hype so far about the potentially-revolutionary new Project Glass, a device that interacts with the Internet via voice commands and turns your daily experiences into a very basic version of augmented reality.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t personally stoked about Google Glass. I think the device has a ton of potential to change the way we interact online, as well as make the Web even more present in our daily lives. It may open the Web up to new kinds of communications, expanding our digital horizons to frontiers we couldn’t have imagined even five years ago.

Still, it’s understandable there have been some naysayers to Google Glass. This device is unlike anything we’ve seen before, so there’s going to be some people out there that will push back on a game changer like this.

Do they have legitimate reasons to be concerned? Probably.

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My feeling on Google Glass is that this innovation highlights how far technology has leapt past traditional social norms, as well as the laws we sometimes need to protect ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong; Google Glass is a brilliant idea and will change the world. Yet we do need to critically examine this device, not just for reasons of technological curiosity, but also to ensure we allow the law to catch up to the technology.

So what are the potential pitfalls of Google Glass?

The device will make unprecedented changes to the concept of personal privacy

You don’t have to be a deep thinker on digital matters to realize the obvious about Google Glass: it is a privacy advocate’s nightmare.

The device is loaded to the gills with features that can be used (and abused) to gather a treasure trove of data about a person; video recording, audio recording and photo-taking capabilities are all deeply embedded into Google Glass. The glasses also feature the ability to share content almost immediately onto social networks like Twitter or Facebook, as well as share content in a localized network with other Google Glass users.

On their own, this might not be a big deal for a younger generation used to smartphones and a culture of sharing online. This kind of culture shift has even featured people adapting to privacy needs by instituting rules about about turning off cameras and phones at parties or on spring break.

What makes Google Glass different is the issue of choice, or rather how individuals interact with the data we’ve gathered through the device.

On a smartphone like Apple’s iPhone, we can know with some certainty that a photo we take won’t be going though an Apple server unless we upload it somewhere. With Google Glass, we don’t know how the information we’ve collected will be used by Google and in what contexts. We also don’t know how much user control we’ll have over the photos we take, the video we record and the data we share.

The bottom line is this: can we trust Google to respect a user’s privacy if all the content we’re gathering with Google Glass isn’t really ‘owned‘ by us, but by Google? And even if the company gives us assurances now, in 2013, they won’t use the data without our permission, who is to say they won’t change policies ten years from now?

The line between public and private will be redefined

Here’s a potential surprise for you: there’s no laws on the books in Canada that make it illegal for someone to record video in a public space. Unlike a private establishment, like a bar or club, there’s nothing stopping a person from using a video camera to record the going-ons in a place like a park or street.

Why is this relevant to an issue like Google Glass? Because this kind of device will challenge a lot of our preconceptions about what constitutes ‘public space’ and what doesn’t.

It’s especially important given that this is only Google Glass version 1.0. We can’t predict at this point how widely used this kind of technology will be even in a few years, let alone 20 years. Because of this, people’s ideas about what happens in a public place versus a private one will have to change. Will it become normal for people to be watched by each other, all the time? This kind of Orwellian future might be scary for some, but it also begs us to have bigger debates about what kinds of laws we want to protect people from, well, each other.

We don’t know how Google’s long-term interests are being served by Google Glass

Let’s be honest about something: Google’s not releasing their glasses as a novelty item. They know, as anyone in the tech industry knows, that the future of computing is about making digital a totally immersive experience. In a few years, we’re going to have computers you can wear or even implants in the human body. Generations not yet born will find it totally normal to live their lives, so to speak, as cyborgs. Obviously, some people are going to hate this idea.

Because of this, we have to ask questions about how Google Glass will be used down the road. Will users of Google Glass be eventually exposed to advertising in the glasses themselves? Will users have to pay a fee to keep their data confidential? Will we have choices to opt-out of sharing information or not down the road?

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All of these questions are important, because Google has gotten very powerful and very rich off the apparatus of advertising through search. This isn’t a policy we can expect to end any time soon.

In any event, the backlash against Google Glass has already begun in some quarters. There will be people who will hate this technology with a passion. Still, it's not going away. So we better, as a society, learn to accommodate Google Glass.

The revolution has only just begun.

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