Welcome to Google Island
(disclaimer: I work for Google. My words are not theirs)At first I thought "oh. Google fan fiction. This is what we have come to." After a moment, though, I realized that this article isn't really any different from the other hyperventilating blog posts that have appeared all over HN recently. I'm not saying that these aren't important topics to discuss, but everything I've read recently has come off as a prurient privacy daydream. Whether it's people writing polemic screeds about Glass despite knowing nothing about how the devices actually work (which they make up for by imagining a host of capabilities and features that it doesn't have), or things like this that manufacture a Lovecraftian monstrosity that has as much in common with the Google of today as a pineapple, they're not really saying anything interesting. Every argument is trivial to win if you first convert your opponent into Mecha-Hitler.Is privacy a central, unsolved challenge for the next decade? Yes. On the one hand Google (and Apple and Amazon and ... ) need to innovate, or we'll soon see posts on HN describing how "Search has stagnated" and "Google is done for". Keyword search isn't good enough anymore, but to do anything more you need to start understanding the user's context. The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. Sadly, no one's really talking about that.(there's an equally interesting discussion to be had regarding public privacy and cameras, but villifying Glass isn't going to make that problem go away.)