Skift Take

In the future, FBI informants won't be asked if they are wearing a wire. Instead, the question might be: Are those Google Glasses?

Google Glass is Google’s unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy. Our traditional bogeyman for privacy was Big Brother and its physical manifestation — closed-circuit TV — but the reality today is closer to what I call Little Sister, and she is socially active, curious, sufficiently tech-savvy, growing up in the land of “free,” getting on with life and creating a digital exhaust that is there for the taking.

The sustained conversation around Glass will be sufficient to lead to a societal shift in how we think about the ownership of data, and to extrapolate a bit, the kind of cities we want to live in. For me, the argument that Glass is somehow inherently nefarious misses a more interesting point: It is a physical and obvious manifestation of things that already exist and are widely deployed today, whose lack of physical, obvious presence has limited a mainstream critical discourse.

 

smartphone

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Tags: google glass, privacy

Photo credit: Google founder Sergey Brin poses for a portrait wearing Google Glass glasses during New York Fashion Week, September 9, 2012. Carlo Allegri / Reuters

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