Glasshole

So I just remembered that I actually have some personal experience with this issue. My girlfriend is getting her PhD in computer vision, and one of her labmates was working on summarization algorithms (imagine a program that could take 6 hours of continuous footage, and spit out a 1-minute highlight reel). She volunteered to wear a camera for a day to gather data for him, and she asked me permission to do so while we were out & about during a weekend. I agreed (with conditions--blurred faces in the final paper), we took the footage, he published his paper, it was fine.

Like a year later, someone else who is working in a similar field reached out to her labmate to ask for the raw data. Thankfully, he asked us if we were ok with it, because I kind of wasn't. I had agreed to let one person that I kind of knew already to see footage of me. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of 6 hours of me conversing with my girlfriend at a brewery being passed around between who knows how many labs, and appearing in who knows how many papers, over a period of who knows how many years. Cuz I mean, once you lose control over who has access to that data, even just a tiny bit, that genie isn't going back into that bottle. Not that there was anything to care about, it was just a brewery and playing with some legos at home, but I didn't like the idea of becoming The Guy, and data sets have a way of becoming institutions in that field.

And it wasn't just me, either. We were in a semi-public space, there were other people in the background. I have no idea if they would be cool with being in an academic paper. Maybe they would be, but they never even knew they were being recorded, so it seemed kind of unfair to make that call for them. We eventually decided to not allow the data to be shared.

So then her labmate asked if he could just send over the audio data. To which our response was "why are we only finding out now that thing was recording audio?" That left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

So I don't know if I have a point really, I'm just sharing my experience with this. The big issue for me is loss of awareness and loss of control. I know who or what is seeing me, because I can see them back; I can be aware if someone is setting up a camera, and leave or hide my face or ask them what they're doing. I'm (approximately) aware of who can observe me, and who has or will have access to those observations in the future. The troubling aspect of Glass is that it introduces an asymmetry that I feel is to my disadvantage: if someone observes me with Glass, access to that observation is potentially unbounded. This feels to me like a loss of control, and that's why Glass makes me uncomfortable.

It never occurred to me to call the person writing Jerry. I have always thought of the writing as Tycho's. I mean that in the same way I would say Hamlet said "To be or not to be..." rather than Shakespeare said.

Tangential to the actual post's content, but I'm a bit miffed at the "Microsoft is the victim of bad messaging" trope: what distinguishes "bad messaging" from the argument not made (deliberately or not) is, apparently, the existence of an argument deemed better - but that's never been any basis to determine the former. Talk about the potential of Microsoft's system (and we can do so independently of Microsoft) - but the act itself is nothing that deserves pity or accommodation. A policy of taking arguments at face value at the very least allows for consistency.

Weirdly, I had no idea what he was talking about in the final paragraph, because I lack enough background information. But somehow I enjoyed reading it anyway, because of the last sentence. That was brilliant.

> The thought of speaking to someone wearing the device makes me a little uncomfortable. I realize that may sound a little luddite-esque to certain members of this community, but there you have it.

Not to me. It's the social equivalent of walking around holding your smartphone, recording everything. Sure, you might not actually be recording everything, but when you hold it up like that I have no idea if you are.

An audio-only version of glass may be more socially palatable.

Still though, it'll be interesting to see how this works when it is available for the common public. I personally feel that people wearing bluetooth headsets in public are sorta douchey-looking (just my personal impression), I wonder if that's going to be any different with Glass (I doubt it).