From the first mention of Google Glass, it seemed inevitable that this state-of-the-art technology would eventually be used as a surveillance tool for law enforcement officials to further infringe on our privacy. That’s why it comes as no surprise that the NYPD recently purchased a few pairs of the cutting-edge specs to test their efficiency in the field.
Government law enforcement officials who walk around with computerized glasses capable of recording, facial recognition, and access to a myriad of federal databases — does this not sound like a dystopian fantasy straight out of an Orwellian nightmare?
In The Peak’s fifth issue this semester, Adam Van der Zwan wrote an insightful piece on the legal implications of Google Glass. Although the legal implications are unnerving, the potential for infringement on privacy and equality is a scary threat to the current state of civil freedoms.
What frightens me most about Glass in the hands of law enforcement officials is the ability to identify a face, and match it with records stored in a database. With the extensive GPS and cyber-data collections officials have access to, they would essentially have a person’s whole life story laid out on a pane of glass.
There seem to be no limitations on how far officials will go to protect us from ourselves.
This means profiling based on where we have been, what we’ve searched on the Internet, and what kinds of photos we’re tagged in. This will only serve to encourage police profiling.
Tactics like “Stop-and-Frisk,” popular in recent New York history, in which officers stop individuals on the street and pat them down simply because they look suspicious, are bound to become more popular.
Apart from racial profiling, Google Glass and similar technologies invite a new kind of profiling: one relient on digitized history. Google Glass’s recording capabilities are another obvious potential privacy infringement. Consider how much can be recorded when everyone is wearing recording devices on their faces.
Of course, this could potentially work in favour of the general public: law enforcement officials will be under just as much surveillance as the rest of us. In any police encounters we could request Glass footage of the event from an officer’s point of view, and have video evidence of exactly what happened. But this one positive hardly outweighs the negatives.
Consider facial recognition capabilities. At this point in time, Google Glass lacks the ability to recognize faces, but it is not a stretch to imagine that this feature will be possible in the future.
The government have proved that they’re willing to spy through any means, as we’ve seen recently with our own Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) using airport wifi to do so, or America’s National Security Agency (NSA) collecting user data from smartphone apps like Angry Birds. There seem to be no limitations on how far officials will go to protect us from ourselves.
Beyond Google Glass’s potential legal problems, we need to worry more about its use as a surveillance tool. It is bound to infringe on our privacy, alienate us into compliance and remove a few more of our civil liberties.
