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.
Google's Sergey Brin wearing Gogle Glass on the New York Subway
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.
