Creepier By The Minute: Google Glass Will Identify People By Clothing Choices

Creepier By The Minute: Google Glass Will Identify People By Clothing Choices(macgasm.net)

26 points by fcukdigg 13 years ago | 45 comments

beatpanda 13 years ago |

Who's working on technology like this, and why? And why isn't it self-evidently bad to the people working on it?

I think a code of professional ethics around software engineering is long past due. Journalists started doing this in the 20s[1] after a series of events, including the Spanish-American war, made the awful potential of ethical lapses in journalism obvious to everyone.[2]

We can't continue to maintain the reflexive belief that technology is neutral and is only dangerous depending on how it's used. At some point people have to be willing to refuse to work on certain things because of the obvious social implications those things would have.

I don't know how anybody could be working on things like lethal drones, facial recognition, locked bootloaders, deep packet inspection, or other freedom-reducing technology without considering the consequences of their work.

And I recognize that not everybody thinks the technologies I mentioned above are categorically wrong, but it'd be cool to start a conversation to draw lines about what is.

1. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp 2. Spare me, I know the profession isn't perfect and ethical lapses still abound, but at least we have some way of knowing when an ethical standard has been broken.

meej 13 years ago | |

"I think a code of professional ethics around software engineering is long past due."

I can think of several existing codes of ethics that might apply to software engineering.

For starters, the ACM Code of Ethics was adopted over 20 years ago. http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics

The IEEE Code of Ethics dates to 1963, which is when AIEE merged with IRE. http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

IEEE's Computer Society also has its own code of ethics, adopted jointly with the ACM in 1999. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/certification/resources/c...

Finally, there's the Obligations of the Order of the Engineer, which has been around since 1970. http://www.order-of-the-engineer.org/?page_id=6

NCSU's Ethics in Computing website has links to most of these, and more. http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/basics/codes/

My own experience in the software industry is that professional society membership and conference attendance is relatively rare, especially when I compare it to other fields I have exposure to, like the library world, where membership in at least one professional society is de rigueur. I wonder if the problem is not a lack of a code of professional ethics but rather a lack of exposure to them?

eloisius 13 years ago | |

What's wrong with facial recognition? It has numerous positive uses. Automatically annotating family photo albums being one, trivial example.

Even "lethal" drones--it's not like there's one software developer who makes LethalDrone OS. There are many components to it that have very positive possibilities, for example auto stabilizing flight controls, which can and will end up being used in search and rescue drones.

beatpanda 13 years ago | | |

I'm also a litte perplexed about why anybody needs tagging in photos. If you take photos of your family, you already know who they are. Same thing with pictures of your friends. It seems like the only reason anybody uses tagging on Facebook is to alert their friends that they're in a photo.

To me, that use case for facial recognition always felt like a front. It's an edge case, used as a justification for technology where the base case is surveillance agencies using it to identify whoever they might be after in public.

beatpanda 13 years ago | | |

And you're telling me at no point did any software engineer write the code that allows the pilot to fire a gun, or do calculations to account for the impact of "kickback" from firing a projectile on a drone's flight path, or...

phaylon 13 years ago | | |

For something less trivial, one of my thoughts for Google Glass was that it could help people who can't recognize faces themselves.

aviraldg 13 years ago |

I don't think this is creepy at all - in fact, this is how human vision works. Besides, the fact that the article's on a website called "Macgasm" doesn't lend much credence to the opinions expressed in it.

micampe 13 years ago | |

> Besides, the fact that the article's on a website called "Macgasm" doesn't lend much credence to the opinions expressed in it.

This shows your bias as much as it does the website's.

Also, opinions are not to be believed, you agree or disagree with them, both are options.

beatpanda 13 years ago | |

When I notice a stranger wearing a certain brand of shirt I don't walk up to them and start asking them if they want to buy an array of similar shirts from me and whip out a credit card reader. In what way is this "how human vision works"?

aviraldg 13 years ago | | |

Google has explicitly stated that they do not intend to, and will not use Glass for advertising. This feature is similar to "Find My Friends" and is clearly opt-in (as it requires prior training) -- have you even read the article?

qompiler 13 years ago |

This is how people react to being recorded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDumyGJdLrU

Good luck Google!

shurcooL 13 years ago | |

Google Glass has the advantage that you can't tell if it's recording. "Don't worry, I'm not recording a video," they'll say. You can't accuse people of wearing glasses that may or may not record.

Similarly, when people use smartphones, they could be recording with the back camera, but people are okay with that. They assume no recording takes place simply because it's the more likely situation.

notatoad 13 years ago | | |

You can't tell if it is recording, except for the red LED on the outside of glass that lights up to tell you when it is recording.

fcukdigg 13 years ago | |

The next decade is going to be interesting if things like Google Glass become the norm.

abraininavat 13 years ago | |

If Google put a light on the glasses that lights up whenever the glasses are recording, would you people stop acting like it's a big deal? A wearable computer with a heads-up interface is more than a spy camcorder.

bsimpson 13 years ago | | |

Don't they already have that light? In fact, isn't surreptitious recording illegal in jurisdictions like Japan?

ajross 13 years ago |

I understand the sentiment, but not really the direction of it. Why is Google Glass special here? We spend most of our public lives on CCTV already (seriously, we really do). Why is it more upsetting that normal people have access to this now instead of restaurants and stores and workplaces and public venues and...

I'm not saying there's no privacy issue here. I'm saying this ship has sailed. Why pick on Google and not your local convenience store?

eksith 13 years ago |

"dug up by New Scientist"

I'm sorry, is this the same New Scientist that suggested (arguably hyped) a piece of technology that has no hope of working in the real world as a plausible replacement for other modes of transportation? OK, just thought I'd clear that up. Thanks for playing... next.

Note, for context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive#New_Scientist_article

This is no different than Google's "Try these too" feature when browsing for images.

When you're digging into NS for panic fodder, you know you're desperate. You know what else is creepy, follows us around, but we all take for granted? Voice recognition.

JonnieCache 13 years ago |

Maybe in the future there will be communities set up in secluded locations where stuff like this is banned.

I'd love to live in a small town where everything from mobile phones onwards had to be left at the gate.

Of course you then have all the usual monocultural problems with gated communities.

Like people have said, we're already all watched by CCTV anyway, especially here, so if I really cared I'd be looking for that community already.

yardie 13 years ago |

As an expat living in France I just discovered this thing called "droit d'image." I wonder how Google is going to reconcile their glasses with people's right to privacy (or right to not be recognizably recorded) in public. It's one thing to drive a few hundred Map cars around and scrub the images. It will be something else when thousands of these are deployed and everyone on the other side of the glass will need to have consent.

s_baby 13 years ago | |

Question is how is France going to reconcile being stuck in the 20th century?

bsimpson 13 years ago |

I feel like Google is losing a PR war around Glass, almost as badly as Adobe lost its around Flash.

Glass will probably be adopted among adventure sports enthusiasts and niches of skilled laborers, but if they want to see them become accepted in everyday life, they need to do a better job assuaging people's concerns around privacy, fashionability, and information addiction.

abraininavat 13 years ago |

macgasm.net, huh? They'll think it's creepy until Apple comes out with the iGlasses five years later, and then it'll be revolutionary.

nicholassmith 13 years ago | |

You do understand the reason most people think it's creepy isn't necessarily that it's recording, but that it's recording and sending video to a company who's had so many run in's with privacy laws and wants to store as much information on a person as possible? Right? Not everything is about Apple vs Google.

abraininavat 13 years ago | | |

Oh, I'm sorry, I should have attributed a higher level of journalistic integrity to a site called macgasm.net