But Google Now, and the Star Trek computer approach to search in general, aim to be far more personal than classic Google Search. Already, Now uses your phone’s GPS to keep tabs on your location — not just where you are at the moment, but where you’ve been — so it knows where you live and where you work. It scans your Google Calendar and Google Contacts to help it figure out what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with. It peeks in your Gmail to find items such as tracking information for packages on their way to you. And it checks your search history to deduce stuff like which sports teams and stock quotes you follow. Then it displays cards showing information you might be interested in.
In other words, Google Now provides a form of search which isn’t search at all, strictly speaking. It’s anticipatory rather than reactive, and the only reason it works at all is because it’s so plugged into your life.
I’m still somewhat at a loss to understand why so many people seem to misunderstand the problem of Glass.
The loss of privacy implications of Glass are not, in the main, from its camera looking outward at others, with the concomitant loss of others’ privacy. The loss of privacy is primarily that of the wearer, and it’s significant.
Now, if Glass or similar technology never becomes widely adopted, the issue is somewhat mitigated, but not entirely. The current “point-and-laugh” reaction is understandable, and utterly deserved. But Glass will provide significant advantages to its wearers as apps are developed that exploit its capabilities. Those advantages, some of them well into the “creepy” area (Apps that may purport to detect the “truthfulness” of someone’s representations - a “lie detector” if you will - is one example.), may propel widespread adoption, but only time will tell.
No, Google is using Glass to obtain data on its wearers. Google wishes to understand user behavior in order to better refine the predictive algorithms of its “big data” advertising engines. Glass is an intrusive surveillance technology that gives Google an incredible view into the daily lives of its wearers. They will use that data to make correlations with the data they receive through their other products, all of which are intended to extract information from their users. The insights provided from Glass will help to make the coarser data obtained from Android, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google+, and all the other surveillance efforts, more valuable. So even if Glass is never widely adopted, the information gathered from whatever the installed base turns out to be will be useful to make all the other data collection efforts more valuable.
I believe that, ideally, Google hopes that Glass is widely adopted. Again, that kind of access into users’ lives is incredibly valuable in terms of being able to influence their choices. Recall that everything you see in Glass is filtered through Google’s big-data algorithms to determine what Google believes is “most relevant” for you - and likely “most advantageous” for Google.
And please bear in mind that the information Google gathers on individuals will ultimately, if it hasn’t already, be perceived as an invaluable resource to government in the interest of “national security.” Information gathered by Google by any means, not just Glass.
Regardless of whether or not Glass is ever commercially successful as a product, this is a horrifying example of people willingly surrendering any notion of privacy whatsover (recall Scoble’s picture in the shower) to a commercial entity that has no accountability to them whatsoever.
Glass should be illegal. Google should be ashamed. Its advocates and apologists are all fools.
I tried to post this as a link, but it didn’t work. Perhaps there’s some restriction on the amount of text in a link post. Opaque to me. Don’t recall having that problem before.
This should be no surprise. The Really Smart People™ at Google need as clean a data set as they can manage to determine just what level of granularity Glass can achieve. If users were allowed to share their surveillance devices it would fuzz up the data. They need to correlate Glass inputs with inputs from other sources to begin to refine inferences from the more mainstream data sources.
If you’re a Glass wearer, Google’s going to be observing your behavior and comparing the outputs of its predictive algorithms using mainstream data against your observed behavior as collected by Glass. If you allow someone else to wear your device, Google has no idea what other data to correlate against - unless there were some way to “sign in.” That may be coming. But right now they need to get some good data on just how valuable this data stream might be, and how hard to fight for it if a backlash emerges.
Right now they’re not allowing advertising in Glass apps. That’s partly to ensure the best experience by early adopters. Later they will allow advertising, likely their own, and they’ll measure how effective that is. Ads delivered by Glass are likely to be based on predictions, and Google is going to want metrics on how accurate (and therefore valuable) those predictions are. It’s also possible the ads will be delivered by other means, if the prompt isn’t especially time-sensitive. There’s no compelling reason why an ad that is intended for a highly vulnerable user must be displayed by Glass.
Right now, I think in some ways Glass remains an experiment. The nature of the intrusiveness of this form of surveillance seems lost on the majority of people. I think Google knows that once enough people understand just what Google is collecting with this device, a backlash will develop. How that plays out will depend, to some extent, on how valuable Google perceives the data from Glass. There is no such thing as “bad” data, there is just “more” valuable and “less” valuable data. If this is very valuable data, and its progress to date seems to indicate that Google believes it is, it will fight very hard.
Even if Glass were ultimately banned (except for government and law enforcement, perhaps), Google will be able to use the data it will begin collecting now to refine the predictive algorithms that rely on the mainstream data sets (Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, Google+, Android, etc.) and make that data more valuable.
Google is arrogant and pursues a policy of seeking forgiveness rather than permission, because once it has the data - as in the book scanning, the wifi data, the Safari cookies, - it has the data. It can’t “unsee” it. The algorithms can be tuned and refined. Data is data, and they try to grab as much of it as they can before someone tells them they can’t.
And so far, almost no one has told them they can’t.
Facebook is beating Google in social. But Google has more pervasive, persistent data sources on consumers through its other apps and services, chiefly Gmail, Maps, Docs, Now, Drive, etc. They need the social graph piece, which is what Google+ was designed to address, but they have large pieces Facebook doesn’t have.
This is Facebook’s effort to close that gap. If they can get their phone platform into enough hands, they can begin to to do so; but that’s a big “if.” Google is facing a problem with it’s “open” Android, and competitors forking it to exclude Google from the data stream.
Android is a surveillance device. It’s the drone in your pocket. We’re all worried about government drones overhead, but Google’s put one in everyone’s pockets.
Facebook and Google are direct competitors. They’re both looking to sell highly predictive data to advertisers that identify likely “hot” prospects. For us, that means “relevant” intrusive ads. But it will go further than that. The predictive algorithms will be used to identify when we are most vulnerable to particular forms of influence through media or advertising. We are going to be be played.
These guys have very smart people working on this, because this is how they want to make their money, by empowering merchants. They are not interested in empowering us, whether you regard us as users, consumers or customers. We’re the product.
The tech press is enamored with smart people doing whizzy things with computers. Big data is the latest buzzword. And big data can do remarkably valuable things for us as a civilization. But we’re going to use it to sell crap. To extract more wealth from the middle and lower classes and funnel it to the corporations.
There is no skepticism from the press. No critical inquiry into what Google, and Facebook, are doing in their data centers with this data. We’re all worried about government drones overhead, but we’re willingly paying for the privilege of installing persistent, intrusive surveillance devices in our pockets; and if Google has its way with Glass, on our heads.
Apple makes its money selling shiny widgets. It sucks at big data, it’s not in its core mission. Apple is a latter day industrial company. It makes things. Google and Facebook are post-industrial companies. They don’t make things, they gather and manipulate data. And they’re not doing it for us. They’re doing it for major corporations.
Amazon is a retail outfit, and it’s also looking like it wants to get into the services business. It has some big data play as well, but they’re not as troubling, to my mind, as Google and now Facebook.
The other challenge will come when government decides that all that data has some sort of national security interest. What Google is doing is essentially what Total Information Awareness was supposed to do, although Google is looking for suckers, er, potential customers instead of terrorists.
And don’t imagine that all this data is anonymized. It may be in some legal sense, but all this data is logged and tracked. It can all be linked back together. Indeed, for this vision to have any meaningful validity, it cannot be effectively anonymous. They may not know your “name,” but they know the ID of the phone in your pocket. And how hard is it to connect those two data points?
It’s just remarkable to me that nobody sees this as a potential problem. People being exploited by big data, and the potential for government to use these surveillance efforts for whatever purposes governments like to use surveillance data for, sometimes not the public interest. J. Edgar Hoover, anyone?
But we’ll all whistle past the graveyard and write breathless stories about how Android is “winning,” and Google has fabulous pictures from the world’s highest peaks in its maps application. All the while empowering them to control and manipulate large segments of society, and extract ever greater amounts of wealth from the middle and lower classes to enrich the oligarchy.
Rock on.
TechHive is running some good mobile switcher articles. On Saturday, Lex Friedman wrote about the first week of a month-long experiment with Windows Phone. Today, Andy Ihnatko—longtime accused Apple fanboy—began a three-part “epic” describing his journey from iOS to Android.
Both are smart,…
Apple is doomed. Thank God. I, for one, welcome Sergey Brin’s all-seeing eye of Android, knowing my every thought before I do.
