Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy?

(Guardian) If you haven't heard about the excitement around Google Glass – the head-mounted glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world – then here's an idea of the interest in them. Last week, someone claiming to be testing Glass for Google auctioned their $1,500 (£995) device on eBay. Bidding had reached $16,000 before eBay stopped it on the basis that the person couldn't prove they had the glasses. (They weren't due to get them until last Friday.)

Photo: Alex Nabaum

Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing" – which experts predict will become pervasive. In the past 50 years we have moved from "mainframe" computers that needed their own rooms to ones that fit in a pocket; any smartphone nowadays has as much raw computing power as a top-of-the-line laptop from 10 years ago.

The next stage is computers that fit on to your body, and Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it. The videos that the company has put online – and the demonstrations by Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, who has been driving these imaginative leaps – suggest you can whirl your child around by their arms, say: "OK, Glass, take video!" and capture the moment. (To activate Glass you need to tilt your head, or touch the side, and then say, "OK Glass, record a video" or "OK Glass take a picture".) The only other way to get that point of view is to strap a camera to your head. Brin has already appeared on stage at a TED conference wearing his Glass glasses (will we call them Glasses?) and looking vaguely like a space pirate. He has described ordinary smartphones as "emasculating" (invoking quite a lot of puzzlement and dictionary-checking: yup, it still means what you thought). And yet people are already beginning to fret about the social implications of Glass (as it's quickly becoming known). The first, and most obvious, is the question of privacy. The second is: how will we behave in groups when the distraction of the internet is only an eye movement away?

Read full article here.