Some thoughts on Google Glass.

I feel obligated to make the following disclaimer: Yes, I am still a privacy advocate. I still teach crypto and train people in using privacy-preserving technologies. I also still don't trust any service that I can't kick because data I produce through them is the product and not the service. That said, Google and Google Glass don't seem to be going away anytime soon. So, here are some of my thoughts on Glass. If you've been bouncing around the consumer electronics set for a while you've undoubtedly heard of Glass, Google's foray into the red-headed stepchild of computer technology for the last few decades, wearable computing. Glass is an astonishingly small and light device that fits comfortably on the earpiece of a pair of eyeglasses with a mass of just 50 grams (about as much as a quarter cup of sugar). As a bit of trivia, the prototype of Glass developed in 2011 reportedly weighed eight pounds. It's a fully self-contained computing device that incorporates a dual-CPU System On A Chip, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage, and a unique heads up display that hovers above the wearer's right eye that looks like a translucent 25" display. It runs a standard build of Android on board, so the user doesn't have to link it to a larger device unless there is no wireless network connectivity (Glass is not cellular-enabled). Android is a general purpose operating system so it can do pretty much anything a larger device running Android can do, including run apps from the Google Play store. The inexorable advance of computing technology has solved many of the user interface problems of early wearable devices; Glass sports natural language voice control, head motion tracking, a capacitative touchpad, and can be remotely controlled with an application running on a mobile device if the user desires. It also offers native integration with many of Google's services, from Gmail to Google Search and Maps, which make it ideal as a navigational aid because the necessary information appears in the heads-up display in realtime. Unsurprisingly the announcement of Glass has spawned a new and fresh kind of controversy, as only things intimately connected with the global Net can. Glass' forward-facing camera and microphone immediately mark it as a potential privacy concern because people in the immediate area don't immediately know if they're being recorded or not. Some people seem to believe that Glass is always recording everything around it and act accordingly. This has resulted in a number of assaults upon the users (though a certain amount of asshattery was involved in some of the altercations (video) (mirror of the video in case it gets taken down)). It's even resulted in some impressive overreactions - in January of 2014 a movie theater run by AMC summoned a team of agents from Federal Protective Services (a field division of the Department of Homeland Security) to detain and interrogate the individual because he was wearing Glass attached to his prescription spectacles. In some ways this backlash is not dissimilar to some of the problems Steven Mann has encountered with his wearable projects over the years. Something I can't help but find interesting is that the attitudes of some of the most vehement anti-Glass protestors don't seem to involve the same amount of vitrol with regard to being recorded while walking down the street, in stores, in bars and clubs, or while traveling in taxis, buses, or trains. But what do I know? Maybe the perceived risk of retaliation is less when one attacks a person rather than an actua