At Google Conference, Cameras Even in the Bathroom
The future came crashing down on me this week at the Google I/O developer conference while I stood at a bathroom urinal. — I had just wrapped up a conversation with a man who owned a pair of Google's Internet-connected glasses, Google Glass.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Glass has spent a year traveling from promise to punchline: TechCrunch framed Project Glass as the future of Google in mid-2012, while augmented-reality experts warned that same spring about serious usability hurdles, and by early May 2013 the device's awkward interactions were being parodied on Saturday Night Live. AllThingsD's April reflections had already zeroed in on the core tension — what it means when a camera-bearing computer points at other people.
The bathroom anecdote from Google I/O lands squarely in that arc, and its timing is awkward for Google: days before the conference, the company responded to Congressional privacy concerns by insisting privacy had been 'top of mind' in Glass development. The story's wide pickup — CNET, TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal, Co.Design and others all ran versions around I/O week — shows how quickly a single etiquette incident became shorthand for the device's social problem.
First-order effects
- Glass Explorers wearing the device in bathrooms and other private spaces put venues and the people around them in an immediate bind: there is no established norm or signage convention for distinguishing an active camera-glasses wearer from anyone else.
- Google faces the backlash directly — every such incident lands on a product whose consumer fate depends on non-wearers tolerating it, undercutting the 'top of mind' privacy assurances the company gave Congress just before I/O.
Second-order effects
- Venue owners and event organizers are pushed toward explicit camera-glasses policies, the way some establishments handled phone cameras — turning etiquette into a compliance question Google does not control.
- Rival wearable makers inherit the same suspicion by category association: any face-mounted camera product now has to answer for Glass's incidents, raising the social bar for the whole segment even before their hardware ships.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, wearable computing's bottleneck shifts from the technical hurdles experts flagged in 2012 to negotiated social permission — recording indicators, venue rules, and possibly legislation become part of the product's required infrastructure.
- The Explorer-program model itself becomes the test case: seeding devices early enough to surface these norms before mass retail is either vindicated as responsible staging or remembered as letting the backlash harden first.
The trend: Wearable computing is discovering that its hardest constraint is not hardware or software but the social license granted by people who are not wearing the device.