It is no secret, I love Mass Effect. So, yes, one of the exciting moments happening is the upcoming release of Mass Effect 3… bring it on! And I love the look of Garrus, the Turian, with his augmented reality screen in front of his eye… totally badass.
Well, until today. Google actually announced to have Augmented Reality glasses available to the public before the year is over, for a very comfortable price tag. Nice? Well… I am not that excited.
True, I am getting to be this old fart, crawling up to the big 4-0, but I cannot get into this concept. Sure, in many movies it has been around for a longer time. But for me, it is more about the privacy issues.
Let me first say, the good:
The augmented reality glasses in combination with GPS direction. It is a perfect win!
I can even picture watching someone and I get the message ‘Don’t forget to congratulate this person with his birthday’ – since I am horrible maintaining an agenda.
Or in architecture, that a project developer can show how a building will look like in the actual surroundings. Come on, that is more than sweet…
But, where I start to draw a line, is the privacy. And this is what has been written everywhere. But the glasses will be running on Android, and will have access to Google apps, and that will soon include Google+. And then we will have this whole anti-trust thing going on, so, Facebook will be there too.
And you know what, I don’t car about me so much…
…but I am a parent of a wonderful daughter.
And I can describe all my concerns about this product in one sentence that any parent will understand directly:
…I don’t want any perv with such glasses looking at my child at school, no matter what her age is then, knowing everything about her. Where she lives, how old she is, what she likes..
There is nothing I can really describe why I could be in favor for such glasses. Technically they might be a big thing, but here privacy might become a very big issue. And my concerns might not stop a multi-billion dollar business, but I do hope that if this indeed shows up – if it has to – that it is only limited to government security agencies.
Between IT, Media and the Litterbox 