Google Glass and Privacy

Three is one too many. Four is right out right out. So today we wanted to talk a little bit about an interesting concern that was brought to our attention. So Google Glass. You know what Google glass is. You've heard of Google glass, right, yeah, sure, sure. It's the little glasses with a Google connectivity that tell you all of your email and buddy stuff and et cetera, the weather. You can have all kinds of augmented reality experiences. Yeah,

you can. You can figure out how to get around town by using a turn by turn directions, all without having to look at a cell phone. You know, it pops up in front of your eyeball, so you're you're only distracted literally all the time, and you don't have to be you don't have to turn away in order to be distracted. Right, Well, there's certainly some concern about distraction there, and and I should give credit where credit

is due. Patrick Kelly posted on our Facebook page. Yeah, an article that was called the Google Glass feature no one is talking about from Creative Good And that's kind of what we wanted to chat about, is some of the concerns people have had about Google Glass. So it's a technology that is in its infancy right now. The article, by the way, was by Mark Hurst. The technology is still very young, so we don't have a lot of firsthand experience with us. In fact, neither Lauren nor I

have had the chance to try one of these. No, no, I think they're currently going for what fifteen hundred dollars and only too. Is it technically an alpha or is it still a beta? Ten? It's it's tech it's a developer beta, Okay. The Google has a yearly event called the Io Event, and at the IO Event they usually announced new products as well as hold very intense workshops with developers to explain how to develop for the various Google platforms and what those Google platforms can do for

the developers. So, if you are a developer with a big company that has a giant website and your company is wondering if there's anything that Google does that would make their website more powerful for the consumer, you send the developer to the IO event to really understand this stuff. Right well, Google also takes this as an opportunity to kind of introduce new toys, push a couple of things here and there shit understandable. They've unveiled things like the

Nexus tablets. They've unveiled, you know, various Android devices. They showed off the Nexus Q, which will one of those things that did not take off so well, not so much. And they've launched products that were software products that got a lot of excitement early on and then maybe didn't work out or maybe they still are working, like Google Plus versus Google Wave, which did not work out so great. One of the things that they've talked about is Google Glass.

They had a spectacular demo. Yeah. Yeah, If you guys have not seen the video, I'm not sure if you're on the internet at all right now, but if you haven't, we'll link it. It's gorgeous. Yeah. So, yeah, Sarah gay Brenn really kind of blew away the crowd. He interrupted the presentation that was going on, the keynote that was going on at that time, to show off an incredible series of stunts that people wearing Google Glass were performing so that you could see what it would look like

from that person's perspective. Because one of the other things that Google Glass has is an integrated camera, right, and that camera can allow you to take video as if you were looking essentially out from the of the person who is wearing the glasses. So it's supposed to be even one step closer to stepping into the skin of another person, right and taking that barrier of the camera away. Yeah.

The video also demonstrated the voice control option that's that's going to come with glass, which you know, you can also control it hypothetically through head gesticulation by nodding yeah, or by a touchpad on the side of the side of the glass, right, there's a capacitance touch screen type well touchpad, you're right, touch pad not touch screen that

allows you to do controls. Yes. From the most recent videos that Google's released, it looks like primarily you'll be using voice commands, so you'd say okay, Glass, and then you would give it, give it the command like okay, Glass, direct me to the nearest Starbucks, and then boop, the little directions come up. And and also we should point out the glass is not pulling information from the Internet

all by itself. It actually needs a link to a smartphone device in order to get the data it needs to operate, so you're you're really pairing it with like an Android device for example. You might use the Bluetooth in both the glass and the phone to make this networked connection, so the phone is almost working like a

modem in a way. All right, sure, and the phone would be I don't know, I've read something about maybe Wi Fi connection to glass, but I'm not you know, of course everything is well, and of course things that aren't incorporated right now may be incorporated by the time there's a consumer model. Absolutely, by the time consumer model comes out, we might find out that they've somehow incorporated a cellular antenna in there, or an LTE antenna so that you can connect to wider networks and not have

to pair it with Wi Fi. Yeah, pair with the phone. So anyway, one of the concerns that that's come up from this amazing technology is that, well, if you're using this to walk around and look at the world through a digital overlay, like if you were to glance at a building and use Google Glass to learn what is in that building, like you know, local Wikipedia page on it, and learn the history of the building, Learn what company

is currently in that building, learn you know. Yeah, you see a restaurant and you pull the menu up in front of you so that you don't have to like it's across the street, and you're like, is it worth crossing the street to go look in that window? Let me pull up the menu. Oh yeah, sloppy Joe sounds good. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and cross the street. Then and then you get run down because you're not paying attention. No, no, no,

that well, that is a danger. I mean, there is always the danger that you're but the idea with Google Glasses, you're supposed to be able to to really concentrate on your environment with as little distraction as possible. Knowing humans as I do, I expect that a lot of us are going to be looking at the screen more frequently than Google necessarily intends. But that might be just a

behavioral thing that will have to work out anyway. So it's giving you this information about the world around you, whether it's pulling that information out via pairing with your smartphone or pulling it from a network directly. The concern is it's eaving a digital path of where you've been right all the time. Every time it pulls something up for you, it makes it a little log, you know, and then someone else can go back in, you know, be it Google or the government, or etcat, or a

suspicious spouse or a potential stalker. I mean, there are a lot of concerns like it could be. It could be something as simple as a friend of yours suddenly discovering that perhaps you were out shopping for a birthday present because they just happened. They just looked at your location data, not with any you know, malevolent intent. But then they're like, oh, oh he's going why would he ever go to there? Oh wait a minute, I remember last time I was there. I was like, yeah, there's

this thing. Oh yeah, Or like you're watching you see that a bunch of your friends have all visited a restaurant that you yourself really loved, and like Oh, I didn't know. They all like that I should go there for my birthday tomorrow. Wait a minute, maybe they're scouting it out, you know. So there's lots of innocent ways

that this could ruin people's good time. But then there's also the more scary ways, like could the government end up if you were to fall under suspicion for some sort of crime, whether you committed it or not, could the government or a law enforcement official go and use some sort of digital trace work to see all the places you've been. And let's say that you are innocent. Okay, let's say, Lauren, let's say we're using a hypthelical situation

where you are the victim here. Okay, I've been wrongfully accused of You've been wrongfully accused of. Let's say shoplifting. Okay, Okay, that's a nice innocent one. I like, I mean, I mean not that shoplifting is in terrible. Kids don't shoplift, but yeah, don't shoplift kids either. No, No, that's a different word. That's kidnapping. That's much worse. Yeah, that is much worse. Okay, So then you have a kid, and then what are you going to do with that? Thing true. Parents,

you can write to Lauren Vogelbaum. So Lauren has been placed under suspicion of shoplifting, and so the law enforcement has has ended up getting whatever they needed to get in order to get the digital log of Lauren's activities. And they see that Lauren has not gone to the store where she was suspected of being a shoplifter, so she's innocent of that. But in the process they see that she's been visiting a certain area which is known for something else that's really bad. Let's say it's an

area that's a known drug lab. Oh no, yeah, you've been going to this drug lab a lot for the last few weeks. Well it's clearly doing it for tech stuff research, but anyway, that would be that, So there's that concern, and so it may be that you it could be that Lauren is again completely innocent. Maybe there's something else she's been going to that's adjacent to a

place that is a known criminal center. But now they've suddenly got an even greater intensity upon her and there's even more of a of a they're encroaching even more upon her privacy. Or maybe she did do something that was a little underhanded, whether it was something really terrible or just a little awful. You know, your spectrum of terrible could be you know, it could be something that was you know, really not that harmful, or it could

be something really bad. Then suddenly they can go after her. So the thing that people are concerned about here is that it is a privacy issue that it could end up making law enforcement companies other types of organizations treat you as if you had done something wrong, even if you never had, treat you as though you were guilty all the time, and use that sort of as an excuse to further invade your privacy. Right. And then beyond that, there's also the fact one of you know, was why

would Google care about where you've been? It's because Google, remember, at its heart, is an advertising company, right. The services that they provide are really so that they can also provide targeted advertising to you. Yeah, and the more they know about you, the more targeted that advertising can be. Correct. Now,

targeted advertising is a two way street, Okay. On the one hand, it means that you have to in order for the ads to be relevant to you, you have to have shared information about yourself in some way, whether it was knowingly or not. You have to reveal information about yourself for those ads to be targeted. But the other side that street is the ads you get are more likely to be really relevant to you. Yeah. Yeah,

you know. For example, in a world where I get fewer advertisements for the NFL, I'm like, well, great, yeah, that's a waste of everyone's time if they're sending me things like that. By the way, the same thing holds true for me. Fewer ads for the NFL would because, let me tell you, they're not effective coming to me. It's just negatorily. Yeah, I will say the NHL used to be before we lost our team anyway, tangent, tangent, right, right,

bring it back. But so, yeah, these targeted ads could be a positive thing depending upon how you use ads. If you are someone who actually says, well, you know, ads, I use ads to help me discover products that I wouldn't see otherwise, or to land a deal for something that I'm actually really looking for. Like, if you're in the market for something in particular, then an ad could be very useful to you. I can agree, yeah, or

you might see it as intrusive. I don't know. I've been really struggling with this the past couple of days when we decided to do this piece about whether or not I actually have a problem with the government being able to check out people like where people have been. It's tough. I mean, we should stress we're here in the United States. We're used to a certain at least

a certain illusion of freedom, of freedom and privacy. You know that depending upon your point of view, it extends to a certain circle, you know, like some people think that it's a circle that's very, very tiny. Indeed at these days, and others are saying, no, that's really too pessimistic and cynical. It's much larger than that. But there are people in other nations. I mean, the United Kingdom, for example, has closed circuit television cameras everywhere every where

they are. People are used to being recorded continually. I mean. And it's not that we're not being recorded more or less continually here, but you know, by by more or less private devices, right, it's not it's not something like you you don't see security camera set up on every street corner in the United States the way you would in only cities in the UK, only at many intersections. Right. Well, yeah, because I mean, I learned from the documentary series Sherlock

that they are all controlled by microft homes. Spoiler alert, I learned that they're controlled by Torchwood from the from the documentary series Torchwood, right, which was a spin off of the Doctor Who documentary. Anyway, in the United States, we, uh, we don't really tend to like that idea of anyone tracking us. And I'm not saying that people in other countries love that idea, but in the United States in particular,

there's a big resistance to that. It's kind of kind of runs antithetical to what we think of as our individual freedoms freedoms, right, So, so there's definitely that this idea of uh, I don't want to give up my privacy, even if it's not for something nefarious. Right. But at the same time, you see these trends in the United States of people using things like Facebook and for Square to voluntarily give up massive amounts of information. Yeah. Yeah.

As of January twenty thirteen, and where we're recording this in March of twenty thirteen, by the way, thirty million people worldwide have made over three billion check ins on four square alone, right, And that's voluntarily giving up your location to people on purpose. Yeah. So it's one of those things where it's if it's your choice, then that's

one thing. If it's something that's happening in the background, then that suddenly seems not so cool, all right, And you know, I think that that's going to be the tipping point for a lot of people. If they can get something out of this, then they're going to go, yeah,

well okay, you know, you know. And also, you know, one of the other concerns is that if people are taking video all the time on Google Glass and that maybe you're not even aware of when people are taking video on Google gas us that there is going to become this database of visual information about everybody available all the time, and that through things like facial recognition software, people will be able to tag your location even your speech. Interesting.

You know, I want to talk more about that, but before we get into that discussion, let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsor. All Right, we're back now, now, Lauren, you were bringing up something really interesting, and in fact, we should say this is really the centerpiece of mark Hurst's article, the Google Glass feature no one is talking about. He does address this idea of giving up your privacy

and the whole voluntary versus involuntary thing. But he says that perhaps what's even more worrisome is the fact that Google Glass is also a video camera and that you can be recording at any time, and that he worries that there might not be any indication that the camera is recording. Right Sure, well, you know I think that right now there's a an led or something slashes when it's recording exactly. But you know, it's the same way that I know lots of people who have electrical tape

over the webcam on their laptop. They might just cover up the little light so that you don't necessarily know that it's recording. Also, there's there's the concern that perhaps a future version of this would either not have the light or would actually be constantly or that Tracy Google would be recording all the time. Tell you yeah, And that Google wants to open this up to developers. I mean, that's why they had the developer beta, which in which

every single pair of these things was fifteen hundred dollars. Now, we don't expect that to be the end consumer price. Once this becomes a consumer product, I would imagine it's going to be significantly less than that. Otherwise, I don't think they're going to have much of a market right now, especially when you take a look at these things. They're a little you know, they're still a little bit clunky.

They're still a little clunky. They've been partnering with some eyeglass designers, so you know that the Yeah, I think that the finalized product is going to be sleeker and very much sleeker. Yeah, and it'll and again it'll probably bess expensive. Dig the Jordie Visor kind of And also, in the interest of full disclosure, I completely intend on getting a pair of these, I really do. I mean I I am aware of these concerns and I understand them and I don't disagree with them. At the same time,

I am incredibly excited by this technology. But as Hurst points out, as you pointed out Lauren, having a access to a video camera all the time that's mounted ready to go to shoot at a moment's notice, all you have to say is okay, glass start recording, or tap a button on the side or not your head a certain way or whatever. Once it's going like, you can't be certain that you know you're not being filmed at

any particular time. I filmed is obviously the wrong word, but we're going to use it because that's the vernacular, the colloquial term. So if you walk into a room and you see that someone's wearing google glass, if you can't see that light, if the light's not visible, or if they've covered it up somehow, or if it's just not even part of that particular form factor, you can't

really be sure you're not being captured on video. Oh right, Yeah, although I would argue that the same is true these days with smartphones that you know, if anyone is sitting in a restaurant with a smartphone out you can, or even not out, you know, it could be recording audio. Yeah,

that's true. You cannot be sure, And there certainly there are times where I was holding up a phone in order to get a signal, and then I realized that the way I'm holding this phone, it looks like I'm trying to take a photo of that dude sitting three three aisles down from the airport where I am, and he hasn't noticed yet, which is probably good for both me and him. So I am going to stop doing that now. But yeah, that's it's part of our reality already.

It's just that to make that even more integrated into

our reality, more prevalent and more integrated. And again, like you were saying, with the facial recognition and all that, these are things that Google Glass could easily incorporate, whether it's a third party app or it's something that's natively designed for the actual Google Glass experience, because you know Google, Google's got a history also of saying, oh, these guys had a great idea, let's let's go to them, will buy the company, and we'll incorporate that directly into the product.

So it's no longer an app that you add on, it's a it's a native feature, right. So if that native feature involves things like, hey, I shot this great video we had karaoke. It was fantastic. I recorded it. It automatically tags all my friends because they're already connected to my Google accounts. So so now you know exactly who's in there. All of them can can search it

and they can watch it. It's entertaining. That sounds awesome, But if it's one of those things where hey, I was at this place when this terrible catastrophe occurred and I decided to capture video of it. That video might be might be useful, but it might also mean that certain people's faces are being tagged and those people like it could end up being a real mess for things like first responders. It could be the law enforcement of officials.

Like you know, in some cases, you're thinking like, well, this is good because it's going to give me a record of what's going on. In other cases, you're thinking like, all right, well, what would happen terribly tragic situation occurs someone someone or multiple people die as a result of this horrible hypothetical tragedy. Okay, someone who is there has Google Glass. They're recording it and because of the cloud based nature of some immediately uploaded it's uploaded people. It's

people are tagged, like including people who have died. And that's how you find it out that one of your loved ones has perished because they've been tagged in a video and it pops up on some sort of Google alert or something. Yeah. Yeah, And that's that's one of those concerns, is that. And it sounds it comes far fetched right now, you know, especially since I'm less familiar

with Google Plus. But I know that on Facebook, you can opt out of their entire entire facial recognition system, sure, and tell it to never do that, and it will just never form the particular a lot of rhythm for you, right right right, And in most cases that's the way it works as well, like Google with Google Plus, if someone tags me in a photo, it gives me the option of either accepting the tag or denying it. So

it's the same sort of thing. It's just one of those questions of if this ends up being like a third party app that gets added on so that there's a particular website where videos will get hosted then and it's not YouTube and it's not something like that, and this person who's wearing the glasses happens to be part of that, then just because you know, YouTube follows this rule, or Facebook follows this rule, Google Plus follows this rule,

doesn't mean that these third parties are necessarily going to follow the rule. So here the interesting part of the question is no longer the privacy of the individual who's wearing the glasses. It's the privacy of everyone that person comes into contact with, because they could potentially be caught on camera right right, And you know, I don't know.

It raises a lot of a lot of interesting thoughts because on the one hand, you know, if you're squeamish about getting tagged and stuff, it's like, well, don't do stuff that you don't want people to know that you've done. Yeah, but that's a that's one of those arguments that's just yeah, it's a weak argument, right, It's a very weak argument. And also, you know there's you get a little bit,

a little bit in nineteen eighty four. Yeah, at that point where where if you assume that you're being watched at any given moment, and therefore you have to live as though, right you are being watched, Like the only reason to behave a certain way is because you'll get in trouble if you do not that the more you pursue that, the more totalitarian it gets, the more Orwellian, Yes, right, right.

So p COO talked a lot about that in the seventies with about panopticons and stuff like that, and that's actually what some of this, some of these fears about Google Glass really reminded me of. And I looked up some of the original quotes from Jeremy Bentham, who's the guy who created theopon pedopticon, of course, being a prison model.

This was back in seventeen eighty seven that he came up with, wherein you can have a single guard tower in the middle watching a ring of prisoner cells all the way around it, and it's set up so that it doesn't matter whether there's a guard in that tower or not at a certain point, because the perception is that there is someone there is someone there, and that

they are watching you. And he said that this is a this is a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, and a quantity hitherto without example, and that to a degree equally without example, secured by whoever

chooses to have it. So so yeah, there you've got that just spread out through an entire culture because instead of it being a guard tower, it's the dude wearing the funky glasses across the street, and all the dudes wearing the funky glass right because over the street, because you know, right now, it's going to be a very few people who have this because they're developers or folks who had fifteen hundred dollars to burn. But otherwise, no,

you didn't, you didn't get that opportunity. So it's not like you're likely to run into this on a regular basis, unless you happen to be in the I guess San Francisco are where you might run into them a little more frequently. But once this gets rolled out into the consumer model, assuming that it does, and I see no reason to assume otherwise, then we're going to see it start to filter out there. Now. I think that knowing

about these concerns means a couple of things. It means one that the people who are working on apps, the people who are working on the products itself or themselves, they need to take these into consideration and make sure that they acknowledge the concerns right and hopefully build in stuff that alleviates some of those concerns. I mean that I doubt that all none the concerns are never going

to completely go away by the very nature of the product. Yeah, and especially I also wanted to put in in this day and age, you know, traditionally, federal law and the Wiretap Act dictated that it was legal actually to record people without their knowledge in most states. That the law was a little bit sticky and varied here and there. But back in and a case went to the second US Circuit Court of Appeals in which a woman was on her deathbed and did not have a will. She

she died actually without creating a will. Her son, as it turned out, had recorded a conversation among his mother and a bunch of their family members right before she passed about what would happen to her estate, and he wound up using this in court to prove his case about what he wanted to happen. And someone else said, Oh, no, you can't use that. You didn't tell us that we were being recorded. That's illegal, And the court said, no,

it's fine. Yeah, I mean, I mean, basically they said that as long as you're not planning on using a recording for illegal purposes, it's no longer illegal to make a recording your back or something. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a sticky situation, is tricky, and of course those laws are going to vary depending upon what country you're in. Oh sure, the sheriff from state to state. And I'm kind of curious to see what this kind of technology

is going to do to laws like that. In the future, We're gonna definitely see some legislation that'll be maybe not directly tied to Google glass, but at least to the

culture of having these cameras everywhere all the time. It's amazing that more of it hasn't happened already, considering the fact that, I mean, you know, citizen journalism has taken off like crazy over the last several years once smartphones really became a thing and the cameras and cell phones got good enough to capture pretty high quality, in some cases extremely high quality video. So yeah, it'll be interesting

to see how that develops. I would hope that perhaps the people who purchase the Google Glass product also keep in mind the concerns of people around them, And I think that it may be one of those things that, as a cultural thing or a social thing, we adopt a way that's polite in that we can say, hey, would you mind not wearing that while we're here because

I find it uncomfortable. And if there's some way to do that in a way that you know, does not upset the person who's wearing them or the person who's making the request, then that's awesome. Yeah, you know, and if it's an event where it's like, but this is a party where everyone's having fun. I was kind of hoping to capture that that's the whole reason why I

brought them. Then you can end up having the conversation and decide, you know, who's being the unreasonable one, and if you're both being perfectly reasonable, then you get to split the party directly down the middle and no one crosses the line. And the guy who doesn't want to be on camera, I don't know. I don't know what you're doing. I don't know what do you do. Yeah, I was reading an Nadget article and Joshua Fullinger, I

believe is how you say it. I'm really apologized to this fine gentle sir if I have just butchered his name. But he said it isn't a privacy issue really or over that, it's a matter of trust. And I thought that that was a good summation. That's a good point. And now keep in mind also that a lot of the concerns are more like, well, sure, you know, if I'm if I'm having lunch with Lauren, I trust Lauren. I don't think Lauren's going it's not her best interest to make me look bad. I've tied up in too

much of her stuff. But no, I trust her not to do anything that would end up making me look bad or making us look bad, making the show look bad. I trust her completely, but when it would come to what about like if she were wearing the Google Glass and recording a conversation just because it was kind of fun and silly, but then something in the background's going on,

Like there's where the concern comes in. Like, yeah, I trust Lauren, but the dude two tables behind me who's meeting a woman who is not his wife at lunch may not trust Lauren. And yeah, and Google Google is not necessarily terrific at a blurring out faces, even in street view, which is relatively small compared to what Google Glass could become. Yeah, So obviously this is one of those things that's going to require a lot of thought

on all parties. And I'm sure that mark Hurst's article is probably not the only one that has addressed this, And I'm sure many of our listeners probably have their own opinions about this subject. And you know, where do you fall on the side of the promise of this technology versus the way it might compromise your privacy or the people around you? Like, what do you think about it? Do you think that it's it's a worthy trade off.

Do you think there's no trade off at all, or do you think that maybe this is a technology that is better as a concept but should not become a physical product. I'm curious to hear what you think. I think it'd be great to hear from you, So why don't you send us an email and if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, throw that in there too. Remember we've got episode five hundred right around the corner, so that's going to be a blast.

Send us an email. Our address is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a message on Facebook or Twitter. You can find our handle. It is tech stuff HSW and Lauren and I will talk to you again really send. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit house stuffworks dot com.