So I just remembered that I actually have some personal experience with this issue. My girlfriend is getting her PhD in computer vision, and one of her labmates was working on summarization algorithms (imagine a program that could take 6 hours of continuous footage, and spit out a 1-minute highlight reel). She volunteered to wear a camera for a day to gather data for him, and she asked me permission to do so while we were out & about during a weekend. I agreed (with conditions--blurred faces in the final paper), we took the footage, he published his paper, it was fine.
Like a year later, someone else who is working in a similar field reached out to her labmate to ask for the raw data. Thankfully, he asked us if we were ok with it, because I kind of wasn't. I had agreed to let one person that I kind of knew already to see footage of me. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of 6 hours of me conversing with my girlfriend at a brewery being passed around between who knows how many labs, and appearing in who knows how many papers, over a period of who knows how many years. Cuz I mean, once you lose control over who has access to that data, even just a tiny bit, that genie isn't going back into that bottle. Not that there was anything to care about, it was just a brewery and playing with some legos at home, but I didn't like the idea of becoming The Guy, and data sets have a way of becoming institutions in that field.
And it wasn't just me, either. We were in a semi-public space, there were other people in the background. I have no idea if they would be cool with being in an academic paper. Maybe they would be, but they never even knew they were being recorded, so it seemed kind of unfair to make that call for them. We eventually decided to not allow the data to be shared.
So then her labmate asked if he could just send over the audio data. To which our response was "why are we only finding out now that thing was recording audio?" That left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
So I don't know if I have a point really, I'm just sharing my experience with this. The big issue for me is loss of awareness and loss of control. I know who or what is seeing me, because I can see them back; I can be aware if someone is setting up a camera, and leave or hide my face or ask them what they're doing. I'm (approximately) aware of who can observe me, and who has or will have access to those observations in the future. The troubling aspect of Glass is that it introduces an asymmetry that I feel is to my disadvantage: if someone observes me with Glass, access to that observation is potentially unbounded. This feels to me like a loss of control, and that's why Glass makes me uncomfortable.
Personally, I don't have a problem with people seeing footage of me in public. Well, not too much. I've always thought that since 1) the recording is legal (AFAIK) and 2) I'm okay with it, everyone else should be and if they aren't, too bad. I've come to realize that this is a Terrible Thought.
PRISM is (arguably) legal, and there are plenty of people that support it, yet I am completely against the program. This is probably just a me thing, but in case it isn't, just be aware that because you think being recorded in public is okay that everyone else is.
The interesting thing about glass is how quickly it blurs the definition of 'public'. I know that anything I say out loud on a street corner is fair game, and (less explicitly) in a restaurant or bar, but what about a house party? At a friends' dinner table? While watering my back lawn in my gym shorts?
Right now the obviousness of (most) recording sets the social norm at "don't point a camera at someone in most situations without consent". When the norm changes to "Always have the camera on and pointing, but please use your judgement about when to record", that will have some serious effects.
Spot on, the issue that people have with the concept of everyone always recording (or at least being able to obtain what they saw over the past N minutes) has to do with an implicit part of the human social contract up until this point.
Basically you could go outside in "public" and within legal bounds do what you wanted with minimal repercussions or lasting impact. But if someone with these devices records you, now there can be a permanent record of you doing, say dancing crazy at a street corner because you felt like it, and that can be associated with you forever.
Yes you did this action in public, but up until these devices are ubiquitous, you likely had the ability to spot people recording you. In the future, anyone looking at you becomes a potential data broker. I don't foresee this doing anything but causing people to curb somewhat abnormal behavior in public for fear of the repercussions.
Or who knows maybe everyone will start doing crazy stuff like dancing for no reason really badly and nobody will care because it doesn't matter and eventually blurs the line of "normal in public".
Unless we jump right to, "Everybody does and says crazy stuff, so it doesn't matter what you said" (which we won't) we are going to go through a period of being extremely cautious. Any time someone with Glass is around, or any time you think someone with Glass might be around, you are speaking the Queen's English and watching what you say & do as if you were on TV.
If people who consent to be in documentaries and reality TV shows often admit to eventually "forgetting the cameras are there" and acting semi-normally despite their presence, then how will Google Glass be any different? There will be a short time period in an individual's life where it's new and they're processing it and they act differently, but then surely we'll all reach the point of "forgetting the cameras are there" and stop minding our Ps and Qs. (Whether this is a good outcome or a bad outcome is left as an exercise to the reader.)
The labmate recorded 6 hours of audio on you without your prior knowledge? That sort of thing can be downright illegal. That lab should have had some adult supervision.
This illustrates why we can't let just let researchers and enthusiasts run wild with new (and old) privacy-impacting technology. Like nuclear and biomedical research, we need an ongoing public discussion about boundaries.
Biomedical and nuclear research potentially yields boons for the public good. Constantly recording your existence for the benefit of an online marketer does not.
Glass is simply paving the way for the future forcing us to deal with the privacy and social issues now. Eventually we will have video recording devices smaller than a grain of rice. What then?
These devices will have very poor image quality. It's not like making small lenses is hard; the properties of light mean that anything usable as a camera will be visible to the naked eye. Cameras can be small, but they cannot be arbitrarily small. Your "What then?" will never happen.
"the properties of light" probably mean we won't have cameras as small as a speck of dust or a grain of sand. But a grain of rice is pretty big. Can you explain why you think that won't be possible?
You can shrink the lens and CCD down that far[0], but adding in a power source and data storage is likely to increase the size. Batteries are not tracking other improvements in technology. Additionally with a lens that small you're almost certainly going to want some form of image processing. You can move the problems of storage and process if you want to radiate or have a wire, but those introduce other concerns. Shrinking the entire package down to a grain of rice seems overly optimistic.
That's a very nice point and is one I had not considered. In hindsight, it's an obvious point, but the best points always are.
I'm curious about your point's effect on Glass: does it render Glass invalid or reduce its market in scope so that Glass is a press/media device? I suspect the latter.
But thinking further: what if, Science-Fiction-style, Glass were so small as to be invisible? Would we all act as if we were always being recorded? What would society be like?]
There are things we grew up with which our kids will hate. Time sheets? Offices? Cash? Commercials? Driving a car? Vitamins? Shopping? Two spaces between sentences? "Closed circuit" cameras?
Like a year later, someone else who is working in a similar field reached out to her labmate to ask for the raw data. Thankfully, he asked us if we were ok with it, because I kind of wasn't. I had agreed to let one person that I kind of knew already to see footage of me. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of 6 hours of me conversing with my girlfriend at a brewery being passed around between who knows how many labs, and appearing in who knows how many papers, over a period of who knows how many years. Cuz I mean, once you lose control over who has access to that data, even just a tiny bit, that genie isn't going back into that bottle. Not that there was anything to care about, it was just a brewery and playing with some legos at home, but I didn't like the idea of becoming The Guy, and data sets have a way of becoming institutions in that field.
And it wasn't just me, either. We were in a semi-public space, there were other people in the background. I have no idea if they would be cool with being in an academic paper. Maybe they would be, but they never even knew they were being recorded, so it seemed kind of unfair to make that call for them. We eventually decided to not allow the data to be shared.
So then her labmate asked if he could just send over the audio data. To which our response was "why are we only finding out now that thing was recording audio?" That left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
So I don't know if I have a point really, I'm just sharing my experience with this. The big issue for me is loss of awareness and loss of control. I know who or what is seeing me, because I can see them back; I can be aware if someone is setting up a camera, and leave or hide my face or ask them what they're doing. I'm (approximately) aware of who can observe me, and who has or will have access to those observations in the future. The troubling aspect of Glass is that it introduces an asymmetry that I feel is to my disadvantage: if someone observes me with Glass, access to that observation is potentially unbounded. This feels to me like a loss of control, and that's why Glass makes me uncomfortable.