My interview for Swedish Press.
Jonas Cullberg of the Swedish paper etc.se interviewed me about my little script Glasshole.sh for their print edition. I responded to his questions profusely only to find just 3500 characters would be printed. I’m posting all my answers here as it gives a little background on where I stand with the device and why I think electronic countermeasures like Glasshole.sh are just the beginning.
Here you go:
Interview
Why did you develop Glasshole.sh?
This script is a response to a comment by Omer Shapira that the presence of Google Glass worn by audience at an ITP graduate exhibition left him feeling understandably uneasy; it was not possible to know whether they were recording, or even streaming what they were recording to a remote service over WiFi.
Glasshole.sh isn’t a project as such. It’s a little script written in under an hour both as a statement of protest and a means of asserting one’s rights in the wireless, networked domain. Google’s Glass is considered by many to be an untrusted, if not hostile, device when encountered in public or private space. In this sense Glasshole.sh can be seen as a network-capable immune response to that felt threat.
How did you get the idea?
I work with WiFi and other radio spectra as part of my Critical Engineering and artistic work. De-authenticating clients from a WiFi network is nothing new, often done by sufficiently knowledgeable network administrators when a wireless device is seen to be abusing the network.
All Glasshole.sh does is leverage pre-existing tools (here from the aircrack-ng suite) to exploit built-in features of wireless (WiFi) networking.
What do you have against Google Glass?
I don’t have anything intrinsically “against” Google’s device, or any other head-mounted, camera-enabled computers for that matter.
My concerns firstly relate to implementation decisions that Google made when designing this device that themselves implement the means to easily and covertly abuse basic rights. Secondly, my concerns relate to a broad lack of criticality among many early adopters, one seemingly in line with Google’s marketing agenda.
In the first case Google made a choice to not put a persistent and externally visible “recording…” LED indicator on the device, let alone an audible tone (as they do with Android devices). This is perhaps the most often cited complaint about their device. They could also have offered an application that resides on a server (itself a privacy concern) or installed on user’s laptops (better) that performs the same face detection and blurring routine that their Street View does, encouraging users to use such a rights-respecting tool before publishing.
Google have the technology and resources to put a great many people’s minds at ease with Glass, yet have done next-to-nothing about it. But this is not unexpected. As we saw with privacy issues surrounding Street View, Google will take a mile until you give them an inch (usually in the form of a lawsuit). Google is fully aware the device will be attractive to voyeurs (or perhaps the voyeur in all of us) and know that an externally prominent recording indicator would harm sales.
The second concern relates to the techno-utopian frame in which Glass is marketed, as an ‘Evolution’, with beta-testers as ‘Explorers’. This is a play on vanity, painting Glass users as a kind of vanguard. So it follows that those critical of Glass are themselves all too easily written-off as being anti-technology, perhaps even against the very spirit of human evolution itself.
Many of the comments and conversations around Glass and privacy are evidence that Google’s marketing has been very effective indeed; Glass has become the centerpiece of a gadget culture so stoned on its own narrative of Evolution that it’s forgotten what privacy actually means and is then enraged by those that haven’t.
What kind of reactions have you been getting from people so far?
Overwhelmingly supportive, for the most part. Bar, restaurant and casino owners aside, a great many people (women in particular) support the little script, citing they feel threatened by the device worn by strangers in their company. Understandably so, with no external indicator that it’s recording, it’s vastly more surreptitious than recording another on one’s smartphone, far easier to record someone without them knowing.
As the Cypherpunk’s Manifesto of 1993 so eloquently puts it, “Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.” Glass (or any surreptitious camera technology) implements the means to more readily take away that power.
Google itself knew that it had a problem here from the very beginning, one it finally decided to publicly recognise by writing an ettiquete guide for Glass owners. In it, they even use the word “Glasshole”.
As for journalists, dozens have written about it. Taking the opportunity to dramatise, a few too many have painted the script as a call to battle, as though I’m running down Mountain View California with an axe. In their hunger or laziness, or both, they mistake the device for the conversation, a conversation far older than Google’s gadget.
I’ve also had some angry email. It has been very useful to read as it reveals misunderstandings as to what privacy actually is, projections of intent and broader cultural narratives. These emails generally have one of two themes: the first is that by implementing a means of detecting and disconnecting a Glass from one’s own wireless network, I am both anti-technology and a “Luddite” - quite an assumption.
The second is that my script is an affront to Glass user’s basic right to document their experience, wherever they are. I find this very interesting. Bound to their head, it’s perhaps easy for them to consider Google’s device as an extension of themselves, a part of who they are. In this way someone taking offense at them wearing it in a public place (or perhaps a bar) is taken personally, an assault to their own basic liberties.
It’s my guess however that none of those same people would tolerate a stranger in the park filming them with a camera and tripod while they played with their kids, or perhaps during an intimate conversation in a restaurant.
Have you heard back from Google about Glasshole?
No. Regardless, the script does nothing illegal and as such they have no legal basis for complaint.
How well does Glasshole work? What potential do you see for the program in the future?
Glasshole.sh works well, very well with an amplified antenna.
The desire for means to ban, block or jam unwanted and/or untrusted devices from one’s territory or personal space will only increase in the years to come. This is just the beginning.
Do you as an artist see any positive opportunities in Google Glass or is it only a bad thing?
Glass is perhaps the most elegant and portable Head Mounted Display since their inception a couple of decades ago.
As someone that worked with Virtual Reality and HMDs in the late 90s, having also written Augmented Reality software some years ago, I see plenty of interesting uses for ultra-portable Head Mounted Displays. More so, the 1st person view it offers film-makers is a step up from the popular GoPro.
For all it’s talents, Google’s Glass has some implementation issues that make it, well, too often the rude guy spoiling the party. For now it seems that’s something that not even a pair of frames from RayBan or Isabelle Olsson can change.
Cheers,
Julian