5 Fears About Google Glass - Is Your Privacy the Biggest Problem?

Perform a search with the words 'Google glass fears' today and there are 6,770,000 hits.
Scanning through the first ten pages, most of the stories are about 'privacy fears'.

Slash Gear are worried about the facial recognition problem. Third parties might be able to develop apps which let your Glass recognise the faces of people nearby - although at the moment, it could just be the people it already knows from memory, soon, this ability might be expanded.

Big arguments on Cnet where people are not sure if they will invade privacy or not - but the article's points about them needing to up their game if they are to appeal to the wider populace are very valid.

Business Insider are talking of the 'paranoia' associated with the unknown. There is talk of banning people wearing them while driving (well, duh!) and many worries about people taking surreptitious pictures.

There are plenty of other fears:
Are they a safe thing to wear close to your temples?
Will they ruin your eyesight?

Now, let's just take a minute to think about things. After all the hype, what do we actually know to be facts? The little child in all of us must yearn for this magical toy, I know I do. But are they really what we have assumed them to be? You know when you assume, you make an ass of you and me!

I think most of us have heard about Robert Scoble. Despite a webpage which takes forever to download, this computerphile has publicly declared his love for the Glass. We have seen him shower with them on (It's Chico time all over again!), we have seen him share them with others, and he has told us that he will never, ever, ever take them off.

Although running time is only 3 hours, so he has to take them off sometimes, unless he just lies down with them on while he recharges them, becoming inanimate himself, waiting for the augmentation to come back.

Because that is what they are supposed to be after all, augmented reality.

So, this privacy thing:

The Fear: Everyone will take pictures of everyone without their knowledge!

No, everyone can take pictures of everyone already without their knowledge.

Not only does almost every other person have a camera in some sort of portable device, but also, secret camera recording devices have been available for years.

What Google glass will bring is some idiot with a pair of glasses frames shouting 'Glass, take a picture' at you when they walk around. Or, they will wave their hands in front of the frames a few times, probably too quickly, switching the camera on and off a few times before they get what they want. Not the magical experience everyone hopes for.  Apparently the resolution is not so sharp at the moment either.

What if the person does not want their picture taken? Can they come and shout, 'Glass, delete all photos' at someone who is wearing Goggle's glaases? In fact can anyone come and talk to your glasses? Have you ever left the room with the Speech Recognition software running and come back to find that it has been obeying someone talking on TV?



The Fear: My pictures will be uploaded online without my knowledge.

Yes, hello? They already can be. How many pics of people have you seen online without their consent? Celebrities without makeup, Walmart shoppers, Geeks and Nerds they are already up there.

What glass will bring, is after taking this low-res photo, someone fumbling with their Smartphone (which already has two high quality cameras), logging in to Facebook or Twitter and doing it that way. Because how are they going to log in to these places with Google Glass? Shout their password in?

As will all mobile devices, we will have to see about the health concerns. In twenty or thirty years' time, we will have to investigate the effects of prolonged use of mobile devices so close to the temples and eyes.

But my biggest worry is the massive potential for distraction.

How many of you have tried to speak to a child who is watching their favourite programme on TV?
The hypnotic effects are much greater if it is favourite video game or when they are lost online.

I've already written about having someone step out into the road while texting.

This is the latest fear: Google glass will produce generations of the deaf, dumb and blind.

Plugged in and zoned out. Augmented, but not actually present in the here and now.

What is going to stop someone trying to read their emails while they drive along the M4?

Or even watching TVCatchup walking along the road?

Try talking to your kids then!

How to Survive a Gas Blast!

This amazing picture shows what happened when a gas blast caused the complete destruction of a house. The amazing blast blew out all the windows of all the houses in the street and could be heard half a mile away.

Incredibly no-one was hurt!

Passers-by escaped with their lives after walking just inches from the house only minutes before.

One young girl was thrown up in the air and landed on top of the debris.

And the elderly lady resident of the property was saved by a wardrobe, which fell on her and protected her from the house falling down around her!

81 year old Betty Hodgkiss lay buried under the wardrobe for an agonizing two hours while firemen struggled their way through to rescue her.

An amazing survivor!

How to Survive A Violin - The Paypal way

I read today about the tragic story of a deceased violin. This was not just any violin (none of them are, are they?) but one which was at the centre of a dispute between a buyer and seller on eBay, which was, at one time, marketed as a website where the little people could buy and sell their unwanted things.

The whole story can be read here: http://www.regretsy.com/2012/01/03/from-the-mailbag-27 but the main details of what happened can be found below:

A smashed violin!!! 

Dear Helen Killer (From the Regretsy blog)

I love your site and was thrilled to hear of your “win” against PayPal. I recently had a heartbreaking experience of my own with them.

I sold an old French violin to a buyer in Canada, and the buyer disputed the label.

This is not uncommon. In the violin market, labels often mean little and there is often disagreement over them. Some of the most expensive violins in the world have disputed labels, but they are works of art nonetheless.

Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as “counterfeit” even though there is no such thing in the violin world.



The buyer was proud of himself, so he sent me a photo of the destroyed violin.

I am now out a violin that made it through WWII as well as $2500. This is of course, upsetting. But my main goal in writing to you is to prevent PayPal from ordering the destruction of violins and other antiquities that they know nothing about. It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn’t have the violin returned to me.

I spoke on the phone to numerous reps from PayPal who 100% defended their action and gave me the party line.

Erica

Heartbreaking is not a strong enough word!

This is normal policy for Paypal, who can apparently order any item to be destroyed if they suspect that it is a fake. An objective observer might say, surely, if they have to deal with so many disputes a day, then it is reasonable to think that they must have to have the same policy apply to everyone.

But, crucially, what this does is to expose both eBay's and paypal's policy of only trusting the word of one party in nearly every dispute. They value their buyers so much that they unerringly seem to fall down on the buyer's side nearly every time.

This is evidenced by the growing numbers of websites full of disgruntled sellers who have their accounts limited or frozen by arbitrary decisions which are churned out on a worryingly regular basis. Look for disgruntled buyers and they are there, but not legions like the sellers are.

In this case the seller listed that they had the violin checked by a luthier but the buyer disputed the authenticity. Well you could say that about anything, who are we supposed to believe? Would you walk into your local designer goods store and dispute their veracity? You would get laughed out of the shop. So, in a listing, which explicitly stated that it was authentic, why did PayPal not even investigate it?

Paypal are at the heart of millions of ecommerce solutions all over the web. They provide many, many families with a means to earn enough to pay their bills - and this does show in the many different reactions to this viral story all over the web.

from the Guardian website we have an antique violin dealer saying "only a fool would buy an instrument without playing it"

From various twitter feeds and social websites there is outrage at this obscenity

This is from Kottke.com

Hey Peter Thiel, instead of whining about the iPhone, Twitter, and internet not being innovative and life-changing enough, why don't you fix this life-ruining piece of sh** company that you cr***ed into the world? That would definitely be a "net plus".

But ultimately this is about a violin, which, if real, managed to survive seventy-plus years in this world, probably thruogh Nazi-occupied France, if you can believe it, but lost the fight against a nameless, faceless PayPal employee. How hopelessly sad.

  How do we survive this? If you feel strongly enough, then surely a complaint to paypal is justified or a comment on a relevant Facebook page.

We must rage against this dying of our humanity.