Looking Towards the Broader Interests in Google Glass

Yesterday Paul Krugman had a post on "The Economics of Evil Google," in which he is exploring the issue of Google's services (Google Reader) being so important to the public, yet not in the interests of the service provider to continue providing them.  He references an article by Ryan Avent on The Economist of "Google's Google Problem."  Both writers are basically pushing the issue of when a private service becomes important enough to be treated (and provided) as a public service.  I've asked it before and I will keep asking it: "when does Google become critical enough infrastructure to warrant an eminent domain conversation?
 
On a related note, as Google Glass comes nearer to market, techno-optimists and techno-cautionaries have been spending a lot of digital ink on what to look forward to or what we should deeply concerned about with this new consumer product.  GigaOM had their post on "The real breakthrough of Google Glass: controlling the internet of things."  I don't think I disagree on the potential for shifting the primary interface with an ecosystem of wirelessly connected things, but across the broader societal landscape, I would hew more closely to the techno-cautionaries in anticipating the important applications of Glass.

For instance, I think the real fun stuff will start to come into play as more people in mainstream society realize that devices like Google Glass are mobile CCTV cameras, recording everything that individuals are looking at.  Beyond the individual privacy issues, about which people are justifiably concerned, lie the very real interests that other economic and societal actors will have. Wait until Glass telemetry is key evidence in court cases, in auto insurance claims disputes, in sexual harassment cases...  It is so very easy to imagine the situation: "No, I swear, he came out of nowhere..." says the car driver.  "And yet your Google Glass feed clearly shows that at the exact moment of the collision, you were looking down at you iPhone," says the insurance company rep.

In this regard, Google Glass simply becomes another sensor platform in what I think is likely to be a very pervasive ecology of sensoring and ubiquitous computing, of which high flying Hellfire-armed drones are merely the most talked about early iteration.  Such a "system" really comes online with a multitude of new stationary or other-mobile sensor platforms, like Glass.