Google Glass Horror Stories From Your Privacy-Free Future - harvardwithereas1986

Call me paranoid, but I believe Google Glass is scary.

Sergey Brin's live demonstration of Google Glass at the Google I/O Conference last month clearly showed that wear, always-on, Web-connected computing technology is here now, and that it kit and boodle. It's forthcoming from one of the wealthiest companies in the macrocosm, a company that mightiness become a lot wealthier if Google Glass accomplishes in the physical realm what the World Wide Web browser has done for Google in the digital realm.

Let me explain. Google has amassed immense power by cataloging and analyzing the Internet, As well as selling ads there. They are masters of that universe. Like many another other tech companies, however, Google isn't satisfied with such a confined sphere of tempt. Google has been searching for ways to process things in the real global the way of life it treats things in the digital domain, by numbering, locating, mapping, cataloging, and analyzing them. Google became the giant it is today by making stuff happening the Web searchable. Does the company see its forward Golden Age in making things in the realistic world-wide searchable?

Or s companies have tried to affix QR codes to objects, placing a digital marker on real-world things and thereby giving those objects delegacy in net. QR codes have seen limited succeeder, but that engineering science is just a cheap parlou trick next to the powerful Web-facultative technology that is Google Looking glass.

Always-On Augmented Reality

Google Glass resembles a sleek pair of recital glasses, take out the narrow lens sits slightly above uncomparable eye. In essence a flyspeck gauze-like computer monitor, the lens can overlay data and images atop the exploiter's visual field, delivering incoming messages, video, maps, Oregon anything else that can transmit wirelessly from a Web server. Google Glassful also incorporates a miniaturized smartphone equipped with cameras, a microphone, a Browser, and speech-recognition capabilities.

For instance, reacting to a spoken location-seek command from the user, the glasses might overlay directions to that specific place, and show identification labels over landmarks along the way. The potential is even wilder–the glasses might video display directions connected how to oppose in a medical emergency, complete with CPR presentment videos and a genuine-meter video chat with a physician.

Such intelligence flowing into the specs for the wearer's welfare is good; it's the entropy that power flow out of the glasses that worries ME. Since Google Meth is machine-accessible to the Net via a libertine wireless connection, it could easily report what the wearer is seeing, hearing, and doing in real clock.

On the Net, Google has become super proficient in tracking users' movements through cookies, and then employing monolithic analytics to bode people's likes, interests, and likelihood to buy. Could Google use Shabu as a platform to track and examine our movements in the echt world?

A Vender's Ambition–and a Consumer's Nightmare?

What's to prevent Google from tracking the movements of our eyeballs to discover the things that catch our attention? When I strike of my apartment house, e.g., a car might pass by that turns my head; I might glance at IT in spite of myself. Could the Google Glass technology form a heat map showing the things my eyes rested on? Perhaps someday the technology will be able to metre how fast and how far I turned my head to feel at something, and then develop a likelihood-to-buy score based happening that. Call it the Whiplash Index.

Capturing that kind of data is the stuff of phantasy for marketers, a cordiform and take indication of which types of ads to push at the spectator, and when to deliver them. And that's one of the most likely abuses of Google Tras: The twist power display ads that are "contextual." In other words, the matter matter of the ads may be driven away objects in the wearer's field of regard, operating room in the general environment surrounding the wearer.

Marketers could partially target such ads via existing localisation-based technology. For instance, Glass might display a voucher for a unrestrained cupful of coffee when IT detects that the wearer is walking just about the advertised deep brown shop (Global Positioning System would reveal this), and that the wearer has glanced over at the coffee shop at least twice along the way.

Ultimate Surveillance

Then in that respect's face recognition. That technology is unsettling enough when it identifies faces in still pictures or recorded video. But if Google Glass were connected to a server that could recognize faces, face recognition could take place in real prison term. Possibly, the wearer could scan a bunch of people and get word labels above those who happened to be friends of friends of friends in Google+. Sure, phone apps that do this already exist, but Glass would hit much apps far simpler to use, and easier to leave track all the time.

This might not be a big deal if just a few people in all city were to finish up wearing away Google Glass. But what if the gimmick were to beguile on, becoming as gravid equally the iPhone is today? All those glasses would be collecting monstrous amounts of audio and video information every infinitesimal of every twenty-four hour period, perchance piping the information through the network for memory board in some huge server farm. Yes, in the 21st century, Big Brother lives connected a farm.

Judgment from the wording of Google's overarching privacy policy and terms of use, the sounds and images that Google Glass records would non be the property of the person wearing the glasses. Google could use those sounds and images for whatever it wants.

As long as we're talking about worst-case scenarios: What if another horrific violent assault were to occur connected our soil, one justified worsened than 9/11? Any multitude say it's non a topic of if, but when such an attack will occur. What if the attack involves something unsafe like chemical or biological weapons, and is perpetrated by people living within the United States?

Our anxiety levels would skyrocket once more, our government might take a revived and even up more aggressive pursuit in surveillance to detect bad actors in our thick, and frightened constituents might be prepared to deliver broad chunks of their privacy in exchange for a little reassurance and ataraxis. Our government could then present itself new powers to access information collected past engineering companies that sell products and services like Google Glass. You won't find a better surveillance tool than a caboodle of people close around transcription everything they see and hear.

Non Evilness, but…

These scenarios are horror stories that may never see the light of day, of line. Internet companies such as Google seem to have a healthy fear of crossing boundaries and suggestion a privacy rebound that could hurt their bottom line.

But Google Glass might let the genie out of the bottle. Even if Google has no intention of victimisation the glasses for anything but entertaining and informing users, the mere world of the pile of period data self-contained could do problems in the future.

Although Google may not do anything "evil" with the device, some other, smaller, poorer, and more desperate startup company might. For instance, if Google refused to enable Glass as a real-time facial-recognition tool, or as a wearable advertising platform, other company might see those things as huge commercialise opportunities.

The answer is not to forbidding or shun such technology. Some of the things that Google Chicken feed does are undeniably cool and useful. But tech companies sometimes forget the maxim that just because you bathroom invent something doesn't stand for you should "productize" it and round IT loose in the wild.

In the end, therefore, it's busy us consumers to recognize possibly harmful or privacy-infringing products and let the makers know that they've gone too far.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/460134/google_glass_horror_stories_from_your_privacy_free_future.html

Posted by: harvardwithereas1986.blogspot.com

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