Here’s Astro Teller, chief of Google’s Glass project, on its failure:
“I’m amazed by how sensitively people responded to some of the privacy issues,” Teller explains, expressing frustration about the backlash against Glass in public, given the prevalence of mobile video. “When someone walks into a bar wearing Glass… there are video cameras all over that bar recording everything.” If it were around a year ago “they’d be Meerkatting,” Teller joked.
“Society’s issues about privacy are completely legitimate,” Teller said. “I’m not making an apology for Google Glass. Google Glass did not move the needle… it was literally a rounding error on the number of cameras in your life.”
It’s not surprising that Google would hire someone possessed by a visionary disinterest in personal privacy, but it is surprising that he’s so baffled by it. Look at that final, bathetic flash of frustration: other people are watching you, why are you angry at us doing it?
It’s so insulated as to invite laughter. Oh, look, another well-off white fellow whose personal imperviousness denies him an appreciation of privacy’s value! But this is a lesson in Google’s general lack of self-awareness.
Its vision is of a world where where we share everything, and where it is the technological glue making such a world not only possible, but a good thing. So they hire visionaries to whom privacy is a trivial concern.
But right now, the things that make Google money are dependent on the value of privacy. It sells access to people, to information about them. It engineers environments where the edges of personal space are exposed. Then it applies heat to our privacy, and exploits the phase-change as it melts.
The result is paradoxical: Google hires people who already think in terms of Google as the social fabric of a high-tech future. But it should be hiring handmaidens of perception, people who know that getting there requires an adroit understanding of our relationship to privacy.
Facebook, funnily enough, has the same problem in reverse: it’s ruthlessly adept at shaving away and monetizing the melting edge of personal privacy, but has no visible plan for survival after new technology makes social bonds too obvious to exploit (or moves them somewhere Facebook can’t go)