Clever Hacks Give Google Glass Many Unintended Powers
Clever Hacks Give Google Glass Many Unintended Powers
by STEVE HENN
July 17, 2013 2:51 PM
Stephen Balaban has re-engineered his Google Glass to
allow for facial recognition.
Courtesy of Stephen Balaban
At Philz Coffee in Palo Alto, Calif., a kid who looks
like he should still be in high school is sitting across from me. He's wearing
Google Glass. As I stare into the device's cyborg eye, I'm waiting for its tiny
screen to light up.
Then, I wait for a signal that Google Glass has
recognized my face.
It isn't supposed to do that, but Stephen Balaban has
hacked it.
"Essentially what I am building is an alternative
operating system that runs on Glass but is not controlled by Google," he
said.
Balaban wants to make it possible to do all sorts of
things with Glass that Google's designers didn't have in mind.
One of the biggest fears about Google Glass is that the
proliferation of these head-mounted computers equipped with intelligent cameras
will fundamentally erode our privacy.
Google has tried to respond to these fears by designing
Glass so it is obvious to the people around these devices when and how they are
being used. For example, to take a picture with Google Glass, you need to issue
a voice command or tap your temple before the screen lights up.
But hackers are proving it's possible to re-engineer
Google Glass in any number of creative ways. And in the process, they've put
Google in an awkward position. The company needs to embrace their creative
talents if it hopes to build a software ecosystem around its new device that
might one day attract millions of consumers. But at the same time, Google wants
to try to rein in uses for Glass that could creep out the public or spook politicians
who are already asking pointed questions about privacy.
So when Balaban first announced he had built an app that
let folks use Glass for facial recognition, Google reacted harshly.
"I'd be lying if I said I was surprised," he
said.
The company said it wouldn't support programs on Glass
that made facial recognition possible — and changed its terms of service to ban
them. But that hasn't stopped techies like Balaban from building these services
anyway.
And now, there are all sorts of things developers are
doing with Glass that were not built into the original design.
Michael DiGiovanni created Winky — a program that lets
someone wearing Google Glass take a photo with a wink of an eye.
Marc Rogers, a principal security researcher at Lookout,
realized he could hijack Glass if you could trick someone into taking a picture
of a malicious QR code — a kind of square-shaped bar code that can send a
computer directly to a website.
But today, Rogers has nothing but praise for how Google
responded to his hack. He says less than two weeks after he disclosed the
problem to Google, the company had fixed it.
"The other thing that is really good is the way they
pushed Google Glass out to a community of people who are particularly good at
finding vulnerabilities and improving software and fixing software — way before
it is a consumer product," Rogers said. "This means that all of these
vulnerabilities — or at least most of them — are going to be found long before
Google Glass ever hits the market."
Google's decision to give the first few thousand pairs of
Google Glass to tinkerers and hackers and geeks was intentional.
"In a case where you have [a product] that is so
different from what is on the market currently, you really have to do these
living laboratories where you figure out what the social and technical issues
are before you release it more widely," said Thad Starner, a professor of
computer science at Georgia Tech and a manager at Google Glass.
When Google released Glass to the public, it didn't sell
it to just anyone. The first few thousand people who got a pair were
developers, a technically sophisticated group whose first impulse was to take
it apart, peer inside its code and understand how it works. These people are
hackers at heart, and when they got their hands on Google Glass, they broke it
on purpose, cracking it open and exploring all the ways it could be used or
possibly abused.
"That's the great service our [Google Glass]
explorers are doing for us," Starner said. "They are actually
teaching us what these issues are and how we can address them."
But some of the issues raised by Google Glass might not
be possible to address with a simple technical fix.
Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of
Washington who specializes in new technologies and privacy, has suggested that
gadgets like Google Glass or civilian drones could act as "privacy
catalysts" and spur conversations and legal debates about privacy in the
digital age. Calo believes the conversations are long overdue.
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