The Creepy Side of Google Glasses

NOREENA HERTZ: I’ll focus on the camera, and start with the optimistic take on the new technology–that it provides an opportunity to share visual information in real time with others potentially thousands of miles away in situations where one needs both hands free. 

Think of it, therefore, as a relatively low-cost device that could potentially link surgeons in the West with medics in developing countries, or a low-cost and super-portable way for reporters or soldiers to broadcast in real time from battlefields and dangerous terrains.

This is the hope.

My concern, having tried on a pair of Google Glasses myself, and also seen Google’s own early marketing efforts, is that they’ll be more often “deployed” in a far less altruistic and far more intrusive way.

We’re already living in a world in which we’ve all got cameras to the ready via the smartphones in our pockets, so to a considerable extent we can already easily transform ourselves into paparazzi, as well as easily be paparazzi’s prey. But when I wore them I was taken aback at just how covert they allowed photography and filming to be.

All you have to do is whisper–“record” or “take a photo” or even just wink, and the moment, conversation, or exchange is captured with the subject of your filming left completely unaware, their consent never given.

No wonder hospitals, casinos and strip clubs have become bedfellows united in their declarations to ban them. Google even barred the glasses from its own shareholder meeting in June. As such, whether they’ll become as ubiquitous as Google hopes is far from clear, at least in their present day iteration.

Noreena Hertz (@NoreenaHertz) is based at the Centre for the Study of Decision-Making at University College London. She is the author of the recently published “Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World.”