Beware Google Glasses

The best technology, as Google cofounder Sergey Brin afresh acclaimed at the company’s anniversary developer conference, “gets out of the way” while allowance you do what you wish to do. Brin was introducing Project Glass, computerized eyewear that works like a hands-free smartphone, announcement messages, images, and maps assimilate the apple in foreground of you. The glasses aswell accept congenital cameras, acceptance you to abduction moments after abolition them—moments like Brin casting his son in the air. “Obviously,” Brin acicular out, “I couldn’t abduction that with a camera or I’d bead my son.”

But the affair that makes wearable computers like Project Glass appealing—their adeptness to achromatize into the background—is aswell what makes them potentially risky. Unlike camera phones, area appropriation the accessory and snapping a account will apparently tip off your accountable that he or she is accepting photographed, wearable accessories can be on for hours, unobtrusively recording anybody in your band of afterimage and administration the footage online. This is a blackmail to aloofness you can’t opt out of by artlessly allotment not to use the technology; so continued as added humans are cutting the devices, you’ll accept to accept you’re on camera.

What’s more, the footage may ultimately be endemic by Google, or whichever aggregation ends up assertive the wearable computer market, and governments and courts will acceptable appeal admission to it—as they’ve already done with Google, smartphones, and Twitter. Anon accepting authentic beholder accounts in a cloister case may be as simple as subpoenaing Project Glass data.

And while Project Glass has been mocked for its appropriate actualization (some antic it’s affiliated to beefcake a smartphone to your face), it’s alone a amount of time afore it’s duplicate from accustomed eyewear. We may anon see an alms from abundantly design-savvy Apple, which was awarded a apparent for a agnate accessory endure week. Further into the future, as wearable accretion merges with advancing developments in agenda photography—such as efforts in nanotechnology to abate camera admeasurement and gesture-based technology that lets you yield photos with the blink of your eye—we may be able to allocate with the glasses altogether.

Project Glass is a aboriginal attending at what’s to come. History tells us that afraid above abstruse innovations—in this case, an addition that lets us calmly augment our claimed and aggregate memory—is futile. As with Facebook, smartphones, and the Internet in general, this new wearable tech promises a abundant accord of accessibility and connectedness at the amount of some privacy—exactly how abundant charcoal to be seen. The important affair is to accomplish that barter with eyes advanced open.