₦airaland Forum

vire: Nigeria also accused foreign countries of sponsoring the Boko Haram insurgency in some parts of the country

vire: On the security challenges in the country, Mr Adoke said, “Nigeria is experiencing the impact of externally-induced internal security challenges,

speeder: This reminds me of what Mugabe told Obama;

Mugabe to Obama: "if you want h0m0sexuality in my country, let me marry you first."

sbaks: if there's anyone to be pardoned i think it is ibori. though his valuables could be confisticated. at least he has suffered enough 'na'

smemud: As the demolition continued, some of the residents wept.

Google Glass might change your life, but not in the way you think. There’s something else Google Glass makes possible that no one – no one – has talked about yet, and so today I’m writing this blog post to describe it.

To read the raving accounts of tech journalists who Google commissioned for demos, you’d think Glass was something between a jetpack and a magic wand: something so cool, so sleek, so irresistible that it must inevitably replace that fading, pitifully out-of-date device called the smartphone.

Sergey Brin himself said as much yesterday, observing that it is “emasculating” to use a smartphone, “rubbing this featureless piece of glass.” His solution to that piece of glass, of course, is called Glass. And his solution to that emasculation is – well, as VentureBeat put it, “Sergey Brin calls smartphones ‘emasculating’ – but dorky Google Glass [is] A-OK.”

Like every other shiny innovation these days, Google Glass will live or die solely on the experience it creates for people. The immediate, most visible problem in the Glass experience is how dorky the user looks while wearing it. No one wants to be the only person in the bar dressed like a cyborg from a 1992 virtual-reality movie. It’s embarrassing. Early adopters will abandon Google Glass if they don’t sense the social approval they seek while wearing it.

Google seems to have calculated this already and recently announced a partnership with Warby Parker, known for its designer glasses favored by the all-important younger demographic. (My own proposal, posted the day before, jokingly suggested that Google look into monocles.)

Except for the awkward physical design, the experience of using Google Glass has won high praise from reviewers. Seeing your bitstreams floating in the air in front of you, it would seem, is an ecstatic experience. Weather! Directions! Social network requests! Email overload! All floating in front of you, never out of your sight! For people who delight in a deluge of digital distractions, this is much more exciting than a smartphone, which forces you back to the boring offline world, every so often, when you put the phone away. Glass promises never to do that. In fact, in a feat of considerable chutzpah, Google is attempting to pitch Glass as an antidote to distraction, since users don’t have to look down at a phone. Right, because now the distractions are all conveniently placed directly into your eyeball! (For a more accurate exploration of Glass-enabled distraction, see this darkly comic parody video. Even edgier is this parody – warning, some spicy language.)

As if all that wasn’t enough, Google Glass comes with yet another, even more important feature: lifebits, the ability to record video of the people, places, and events around you, at all times. Veteran readers will remember that I predicted this six years ago in my book Bit Literacy. From Chapter 13:

The life bitstream will raise new and important issues. Should it be socially acceptable, for example, to record a private conversation with a friend? How will anyone be sure they’re not being recorded, in public or private? … Corporations, police, even friends with ‘life recorders’ will capture the actions and utterances of everyone in sight, whether they like it or not.

Today, finally, that future has arrived: a major company offering the ability to record your life, store it, and share it – all with a simple voice command.

And this is where our story takes a turn, toward a ramification that dwarfs every other issue raised so far on Google Glass. Yes, the glasses look dorky – Google will fix that. And sure, Glass forces users to be permanently plugged-in to Google’s digital world – that’s hardly a concern for the company or, for that matter, most users out there. No. The real issue raised by Google Glass, which will either cause the project to fail or create certain outcomes you may not want (which I’ll describe), has to do with the lifebits. Once again, it’s an issue of experience.

The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience – not of the user, but of everyone other than the user. A tweet by David Yee introduces it well:

There is a kid wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant which, until just now, used to be my favorite spot.

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.

Now, I know the response: “I’m recorded by security cameras all day, it doesn’t bother me, what’s the difference?” Hear me out – I’m not done. What makes Glass so unique is that it’s a Google project. And Google has the capacity to combine Glass with other technologies it owns.

First, take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.

Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.

Now our stage is set: not for what will happen, necessarily, but what I just want to point out could technically happen, by combining tools already available within Google.

Let’s return to the bus ride. It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could immediately be identified by that Google Glass user who gets on the bus and turns the camera toward you. Anything you say within earshot could be recorded, associated with the text, and tagged to your online identity. And stored in Google’s search index. Permanently.

I’m still not done.

The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.

Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

Just think: if a million Google Glasses go out into the world and start storing audio and video of the world around them, the scope of Google search suddenly gets much, much bigger, and that search index will include you. Let me paint a picture. Ten years from now, someone, some company, or some organization, takes an interest in you, wants to know if you’ve ever said anything they consider offensive, or threatening, or just includes a mention of a certain word or phrase they find interesting. A single search query within Google’s cloud – whether initiated by a publicly available search, or a federal subpoena, or anything in between – will instantly bring up documentation of every word you’ve ever spoken within earshot of a Google Glass device.

This is the discussion we should have about Google Glass. The tech community, by all rights, should be leading this discussion. Yet most techies today are still chattering about whether they’ll look cool wearing the device.

Oh, and as for that physical design problem. If Google Glass does well enough in its initial launch to survive to subsequent versions, forget Warby Parker. The next company Google will call is Bausch & Lomb. Why wear bulky glasses when the entire device fits into a contact lens? And that, of course, would be the ultimate expression of the Google Glass idea: a digital world that is even more difficult to turn off, once it’s implanted directly into the user’s body. At that point you’ll not even know who might be recording you. There will be no opting out.

And while I agree about the potential privacy implications (just like I refuse to join G+, Facebook, etc), it should be noted that there’s plenty more in 1984 than the constant surveillance!

MikeNTxs

March 03, 2013 4:16 pm

As someone once said: When the service you use is free, the product they’re selling is YOU.

Anyone would be scared by the reported personal data scooping operation at Google. Imagine being in your library at home, reading or composing an e-mail, entering sensitive data into a form online, surfing the web, or making credit card payments, and every bit of data you enter is captured into a database owned by Google. And all of this is happening without your knowledge and definitely without your permission. Of course, the internet giant has been dragged to court by the United States government, numerous countries, and the European Union for this transgression, but is the litigation really consoling? Hardly!

The collection of the personal data of everyday people is the second known major privacy violation activity that Google has been accused of engaging in over the past few years. The first accusation pertains to the manner in which the company beat the security of Apple’s browser Safari by using special computer codes to install tracking files and bypassing the privacy settings that Apple had developed in the device for the protection ofApple phone users. Millions of innocent Apple customers were reported affected by Google’s expedition.

At the centre of the data scooping activity is the engineer (Mr. Marius Milner) that is alleged to have written the data scooping code. According to Google, the data scooping operation was only a byproduct of the designated project, and was not authorized by the company. Google also claimed ignorance of the existence of such an activity. The Street View project, as the original legitimate assignment was dubbed, pertains to an undertaking to photograph and map the world’s streets. Basically, Google dispatched hundreds of vehicles to photograph city streets all over the world. This was to enable folks using Google maps to view complete images of the location. It also had the objective of gathering data on local wireless networks for the purpose of improving Google search. (Yes, it was all about competitiveness.) According to New York Times journalists Amir Efrati and Don Clark, “an aspect of the project that wasn’t generally known at the time was Google’s collection of data about individual wireless networks, including those in people’s homes. The data, among other things, has been used to help Google figure out the precise location someone using a smartphone powered by the company’s Android software.” Mr. Milner was implicated in leading the collection of the unencrypted information sent from homes by computers as specially equipped automobiles drove by.

The New York Times journalists Steve Lohr and David Streitfeld pointed out that “Google long maintained that Mr. Milner was solely responsible for this aspect of the project, which resulted in official investigations, some still unresolved in more than a dozen countries. But a complete version of the FCC’s report has cast doubt on that explanation, saying that the engineer informed at least one superior and that seven engineers who worked on the code were all in a position to know what was going on.” The FCC report was also said to have had the engineer “spelling out his intentions quite clearly in his initial proposal,” but that the managers on the Street View project said they never read it!

According to Efrati and Clark, “Google denied that it was collecting private data from Wi-Fi users, but it reversed itself the following month. It said it had learned that data had been collected from unprotected Wi-Fi networks and attributed the activity to a single Google engineer.” However, the FCC report contends that the plan to gather data was intentional.

As it turns out, Mr. Milner is a real gem in computer programming for telecoms. He joined Google in 2003, prior to which he was employed at Lucent Technologies and Avaya, both of which are telecom and networking companies. Mr. Milner also created a program called “NetStumbler” which Mr. Milner’s LinkedIn page describes as “the world’s first usable ‘Wardriving’ application for Windows.” The New York Times article quoted the FCC report as noting that wardriving is “the practice of driving streets and using equipment to locate wireless local-area networks, using Wi-Fi, such as wireless hot spots at coffee shops and home wireless networks.”

Lohr and Streitfeld pointed out that “locating and communicating effectively with Wi-Fi networks is an essential capability for mobile computing. It is an important tool in smartphone software like Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, both for communicating and often for location-based services like shopping guides and Foursquare, a mobile application that shows users when friends are nearby.” Moreover, “data beamed from wireless networks guide those location services.” The journalists also said that “according to industry executives and analysts, there are different approaches to using Wi-Fi transmission. The minima approach, they say, is to collect data on the access point and strength of the signal. That is the equivalent of the Wi-Fi network saying, ‘Here I am, and here’s what I can do.”

An issue is whether minimal data is sufficient or Google’s approach of grabbing an exorbitant amount of data is required. A rival to Google in this technology, Skyhook Wireless, feels that minimal data is sufficient, based on their formal research.

Finally, Mr. Quentin Hardy, also a New York Times journalist, is more sympathetic towards Google. He suggests that Google is doing all these “evil” things in order for the company to not “miss the train.” One thing is certainly clear about Google, whether or not it loses the cases in the court of law: it needs a new tag line. “Don’t Be Evil” is no longer appropriate. The company might also be losing out in the court of social responsibility.

I am using Google for a few years now and I think a lot of people have in common with me. But I noticed something news. I think Google follows us. Let me explain. Google is everywhere and every time I am on the internet Google is watching my websites because I am logged in onto my Google account. So every URL, every image, every word I read, they can read too. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with that, you even have the choice too disagree with it by unchecking the box in the settings section of your account.

There will be many people who think Google is chasing you for something bad. But I experienced the opposite. Google helps you when they are following you. They can see your interests based on your searches and they will note them. The good thing of all this is, that you will get search results which do better fit with you. The results you get will be measured by their experiences of your thoughts. And THAT sounds quite interesting.

But that is just the start of. Actually, there are expanding meanwhile. They already got an service for your Gmail called, Priorty Inbox, which shows you the important mail first based on your actions of opening certain mails in front of others.

Another interesting feature from Google, which is also very lucrative, is showing you the advertisements that suit you. Also based on the websites you visit. For example, I have bought a computer recently, but I had to search a lot all over the internet to choose the right one. Google followed me and now, when I am watching a YouTube video, I see ads from the website I have searched for choosing my computer.

Google is smart and they use it to help people and they get also rich with it. I think it is brilliant. And the best thing I do not mind either that Google is getting rich with my thoughts, because they are helping me with an easier life. That IS brilliant.         Placed by Sjoerd van Hoof ⁠ ⁠ at 18:04

Sermwell: mtscheews!!! SMH 4 u!

obi4eze: from mtn to airtel

jamngr84: .
pls waku up from that nightmare.

iamswizz: this is an obstreperous report, presented in a peahen manner

Sermwell: ....knows exactly wat not 2 do!

y2k62: Ldkmd - laff don kill me die

Sermwell: owk na! A dog destined 2 die will 1st loose its sense of smell! Be warned!

gluv01: It is today that the yansh is dey back

Sermwell: Cuz ur safety here cannot be guaranteed!

rationalmind: How is this a prophecy? The verse seems to be talking about something that was happening as at when it was written.