Confessions Of A Google Glass Pervert And Other Hate Crimes
ARE you planning to wear Google Glasses? If you are, let it not go unsaid that you have found a way to look even sadder than the knobs smoking electronic cigarettes that light up at the end. You’ve turned your face into a mobile CCTV camera, gathering and accessing data on friends and strangers like a police state snitch.
Reuters notes:
Google is lobbying officials in at least three U.S. states to stop proposed restrictions on driving with headsets such as Google Glass, marking some of the first clashes over the nascent wearable technology. Some eight U.S. states are considering regulation of Google Glass, a tiny computer screen mounted in the corner of an eyeglass frame. Law enforcement and other groups are concerned that drivers wearing the devices will pay more attention to their email than the road, causing serious accidents.
As John Hendren tweets:
having trouble picturing a person more offensive than someone who believes they are being oppressed over their google glass
Is he joking? Maybe not. In San Francisco hating street spies is a hate crime:
A female tech writer says she was attacked and robbed at a Haight Street dive bar in what she called an anti-tech “hate crime,” after she angered the clientele by using Google Glass at last call.
Sarah Slocum says she was “verbally and physically assaulted… because of some Google Glass haters,” she posted on Facebook on Feb. 22.
Is the pratt in the glasses that call up data when they’re looking at strangers the victim?
Slocum was eagerly showing off the $1,500 computer glasses to fellow patrons at Molotov’s on Haight Street on Friday night, KPIX first reported… two women confronted her with choice curse words — and informed her that techies like her are “destroying the city” with that tech-fueled gentrification we’re hearing so much about — a man grabbed the computer glasses off of her face and ran out, she told news reporters…
Slocum gave chase and recovered her Glass, she says, but in the meantime someone inside the bar stole her purse, with her wallet and cellphone inside.
Really? Eater SF has more:
Slocum was “running around very excited, and people were telling her, ‘You’re being a [rude person], take those glasses off,'” bar-goer Brian Lester told KPIX.
After the angry women confronted her, a male friend of Slocum’s took “the fight physical,” Eater reported. At some point thereafter, the Glass was yanked off of her face.
She should have seen that coming.
Slocum filed a police report and expects SFPD to get to the bottom of the theft and “hate crime” at once, she said.
“[W]hat makes this story special is that no one has experienced a hate crime or been targeted for a hate crime, which is what it was, for wearing Google Glass,” she posted.
Despite the attack, Slocum is still a dedicated Glass user — or, in her own words, a “#glasshead.”
Woman with expensive, invasive toy on face is hated. But the data said she’d be the life and (r)soul of the party…
Posted: 26th, February 2014 | In: Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
