A To Z Challenge: Technology And The Next Big Thing (That Could Invade Your Privacy To Extremes)

Technology is science applied to real-life problems. Physics equations and observations are all well and good--but technology allows the enormous range of scientific fields to play a very large part in people's everyday lives. The term technology has various uses: It can refer to a specific subset of machines (such as space technology) and it can refer to the total knowledge and capability of a society.

To be honest, the second part of this post (the "recent developments" section) came to me before the introduction. Google Glass is a piece of technology I've been wanting to post about for a while and the A to Z Challenge seemed like an ideal spot, seeing as I've already proposed some controversial subjects in previous posts.

Antonio Zugaldia, CC-BY-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Google Glass is a pair of glasses with the capabilities of a smartphone. You give it orders to give you directions, send messages, take photographs and videos, etc., and all while wearing the device as feedback appears in a small screen on one side of the eyeglass frame. While some people (me included) don't like the idea of having multimedia so close to one's actual eyeball, the privacy concerns have to be the most argued-over bit (though there are also concerns about distracted driving and so on).

The problem? There is no way for someone else to tell if a person wearing the glasses is recording--which could mean your face is unwittingly being uploaded to Google's servers and could be played back by the person who recorded the footage, or, perhaps, by governments; facial recognition software could be applied to identify crowds of people just because someone walked through a busy location with Google Glass recording. There aren't any limits to when someone can record, either; imagine all the moments most people would absolutely not want saved for another person to see.

Google Glass is scheduled to arrive some time in 2014, according to the Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt.

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Sources:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/technology
http://techland.time.com/2013/04/23/three-questions-i-hope-google-answers-before-google-glass-is-released/
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-google-glass-2014-eric-schmidt-20130423,0,3402891.story
http://www.google.com/glass/start/

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Will you be wearing the new Google Glasses once they're released? If you run across someone wearing them, will you be worried?


-----The Golden Eagle