Jeff Jarvis reprints the clip above, in an article dismissing the privacy concerns surrounding Google Glass. The Victorian attitudes of Newport’s cottagers, he clearly implies, were misguided and misplaced. “Rest assured,” he writes. ” I will ask you whether it’s OK to take a picture of you in private.”
The key words, here — words which weren’t even part of the cottagers’ vocabulary — are “in private”. We now live in a world where we have public lives and private lives — and for over a century now, since roughly the point at which the above article appeared, the portion of our lives considered “public” has been expanding, while the portion of our lives we can consider “private” has been contracting. What’s more, Jarvis himself is a prominent proponent of the idea that we should maximize the speed at which we move our lives into the public realm; he also equates a desire for privacy with being “scared of the public” .
Never before have we faced so many opportunities to turn the formerly-private into the newly-public. As those opportunities arise, many people adopt them, and turn “public” into the new norm for such activities. Eventually, the norms become societally entrenched, to the point at which it is now utterly unobjectionable for those who once would have been labeled “kodak fiends” to take photographs outside a Newport tennis tournament.
My point here is that technology has a tendency to create its own norms. The classic example is the automobile — a technology which kills more than 30,000 Americans every year. From the 1930s through the 1990s, societal norms about who roads belonged to, and what people should do on them, were turned on their head thanks to the new technology. The dangerous new activity allowed by the new technology became the privileged norm, to the point at which just about all other road-based activity — and roads have been around for thousands of years, remember, since long before the automobile — essentially ceased to exist. Eventually, we reached the point at which elected representatives were happy saying that if a bicyclist gets killed by a car, it’s the bicyclist’s fault for being on the road in the first place.
If Google Glass — and wearable computing more generally — takes off and fulfills its potential, it will change society’s norms about what is public and what is private. It is therefore entirely rational, whatever you think of the set of norms we have right now, to assume that they will end up moving towards something more well disposed towards the new technology.
Jeff Jarvis will welcome that move, and can come up with dozens of reasons why it would be a good thing rather than a bad thing. “There’s no need to panic,” he writes. “We’ll figure it out, just as we have with many technologies—from camera to cameraphone—that came before.” But let’s be clear here about how much weight is carried by that “we’ll figure it out”. Realistically, “figuring it out” means, in large part, changing norms: irrevocably moving the line between what is private and what is public. That might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing. But if you like the norms we have right now — or if you think they’ve already gone too far in terms of robbing individuals of their privacy — then you have every reason to worry about what the onset of wearable computing might portend.
Update: Noah Brier points me to a quote from Daniel Mendelsohn, who goes back further still than the Victorians:
I am amused by the fact our word idiot comes from the Greek word idiotes, which means a private person. It’s from the word idios, which means private as opposed to public. So the Athenians, or the Greeks in general who had such a highly developed sense of the radical distinction between what went on in public and what went on in private, thought that a person that brought his private life into public spaces, who confused public and private, was an idiote, was an idiot. Of course, now everybody does this. We are in a culture of idiots in the Greek sense.
Jarvis' objectivity about Google is a train that left the station a long time ago. For him to say anything bad about Google Glass and privacy concerns would pretty much mean having to recant a lot of what was in What Would Google Do? and Public Parts.
It's also arguably true that the Jarvis world view was shredded by an Evgeny Morozov review in The New Republic in October 2011. The Jarvis response to that review, it followed the publication of Public Parts, was thin gruel. The key takeaway? "Me (Jarvis): 'You don’t like me.' Him (Morozov): 'No, I don’t.'"
This latest piece, at least it seems to me, is Jarvis being ultimately right about things being able to work themselves out, but for the wrong reasons. One rationale, for example, of why the potential privacy issues of Glass should not be a concern is that Google's servers are already storing huge numbers of images with a concurrent capability for facial recognition.
It might be pointed out that back around the mid-1960s there was a study done by Eastman Kodak that, after decades of camera use, indicated the general public accounted for about 90 percent of photographs with the majority of those being snapshots of friends and family.
There were no landmark court cases about privacy concerns. Evidently what actually happened is that instead of social mores being altered to accommodate a new technology, the use of the new technology adapted itself to existing social mores.
#1 Posted by Perry Gaskill, CJR on Mon 20 May 2013 at 04:50 PM
I was curious about all these privacy worries with Glass, so I just looked up how it actually works. In order to take a photo, you have to say out loud "take a photo" or visibly press a camera button on the front, similar for video. While video is recording, a light turns on to signify to outsiders that recording is going on, just like many cameras, though many smartphones don't do this. It may be possible to turn on the camera through use of the Glass touchpad also, but I'm unsure of this.
All this is is a smartphone strapped to your head, I don't see the problem. I understand that people are worried that the Glass camera is always focused, because it's always on your head and focused on whatever you're looking at, whereas you have to hold up a smartphone to focus it, which obviously gives away your intent to snap or record something.
But if anything it's more obvious with Glass that you're taking a photo or video, as most of the time you will announce "take a photo" or "record a video," announcements you don't make with smartphones. ;) Either that or you will be pressing a camera button on the front of Glass, also a giveaway, though it might take time for those being photographed to all know where the camera button is for these head-mounted devices. The external video recording light is a step forward for privacy, my HTC smartphone certainly doesn't have it.
I agree with some of the overall privacy themes of the piece, but Glass isn't any big change on that trend, merely a convenient way to take photos/videos, as it's much easier if you always have a camera strapped to your head. I've certainly wished I'd had something like Glass, rather than always having to carry around my smartphone for pictures.
As for people dumping all their pictures/videos online, I certainly wouldn't do it, which is why I don't use Facebook or any other social network at the moment (I have signed up for a paid service with better privacy, but haven't used it yet). But that is the choice of those using Facebook, certainly don't see that they're idiots for sharing their lives. The big problem is the "free" ad-driven business model of Facebook, which drives that company to sell all that personal data to be able to provide free photo sharing. The problem is the currently popular social platforms, not the photo tech and sharing you bring up.
#2 Posted by Ajay, CJR on Mon 20 May 2013 at 11:23 PM