Google Glass: Orwellian surveillance with fluffier
branding
New technology will make us all agents for Google. Nick
Pickles, Director of Big Brother Watch, says the implications for privacy are
profoundly worrying.
By Nick Pickles 11:56AM GMT 19 Mar 2013
In the online world – for now, at least – it’s the
advertisers that make the world go round. If you’re Google, they represent more
than 90% of your revenue and without them you would cease to exist.
So how do you reconcile the fact that there is a finite amount
of data to be gathered online with the need to expand your data collection to
keep ahead of your competitors?
There are two main routes. Firstly, try as hard as is
legally possible to monopolise the data streams you already have, and hope
regulators fine you less than the profit it generated. Secondly, you need to
get up from behind the computer and hit the streets.
Google Glass is the first major salvo in an arms race
that is going to see increasingly intrusive efforts made to join up our real
lives with the digital businesses we have become accustomed to handing over
huge amounts of personal data to.
The principles that underpin everyday consumer
interactions – choice, informed consent, control – are at risk in a way that
cannot be healthy. Our ability to walk away from a service depends on having a
choice in the first place and knowing what data is collected and how it is used
before we sign up.
Imagine if Google or Facebook decided to install their
own CCTV cameras everywhere, gathering data about our movements, recording our
lives and joining up every camera in the land in one giant control room. It’s
Orwellian surveillance with fluffier branding. And this isn’t just video
surveillance – Glass uses audio recording too. For added impact, if you’re not
content with Google analysing the data, the person can share it to social media
as they see fit too.
Yet that is the reality of Google Glass. Everything you
see, Google sees. You don’t own the data, you don’t control the data and you
definitely don’t know what happens to the data. Put another way – what would
you say if instead of it being Google Glass, it was Government Glass? A
revolutionary way of improving public services, some may say. Call me a cynic, but
I don’t think it’d have much success.
More importantly, who gave you permission to collect data
on the person sitting opposite you on the Tube? How about collecting
information on your children’s friends? There is a gaping hole in the middle of
the Google Glass world and it is one where privacy is not only seen as an
annoying restriction on Google’s profit, but as something that simply does not
even come into the equation. Google has empowered you to ignore the privacy of
other people. Bravo.
It’s already led to reactions in the US. ‘Stop the
Cyborgs’ might sound like the rallying cry of the next Terminator film, but
this is the start of a campaign to ensure places of work, cafes, bars and
public spaces are no-go areas for Google Glass. They’ve already produced
stickers to put up informing people that they should take off their Glass.
They argue, rightly, that this is more than just a
question of privacy. There’s a real issue about how much decision making is
devolved to the display we see, in exactly the same way as the difference
between appearing on page one or page two of Google’s search can spell the
difference between commercial success and failure for small businesses. We
trust what we see, it’s convenient and we don’t question the motives of a search
engine in providing us with information.
The reality is very different. In abandoning critical
thought and decision making, allowing ourselves to be guided by a melee of
search results, social media and advertisements we do risk losing a part of
what it is to be human. You can see the marketing already - Glass is
all-knowing. The issue is that to be all-knowing, it needs you to help it be
all-seeing.
If choice is an illusion created between those with power
and those without, then Google Glass goes to the heart of what it is to live in
a digital world and what it is to exercise choice about your privacy. The
danger is that we lose our privacy and Google gains the power. The reality is
that as profit-making strategies go, there’s nothing better.
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