Glass takes photos and videos on command, allowing you to capture high-definition images and audio wherever you go.
This has privacy advocates worried. After all, you could record people without their consent.
Yet smartphones have had the capability to covertly record audio and video for years. At least with Glass, the camera is visible and when recording, a red light is displayed.
The presence of a GPS chip in Glass means the location of the wearer could be determined, creating another potential privacy issue.
Again, smartphones are already GPS-enabled. If justified, Australian law enforcement can get a warrant to track a person of interest, but regular people cannot be tracked unless they give their permission for individuals to see their location. The same principle would apply to Glass.
Driving a vehicle while wearing Glass has observers worried – perhaps rightly so. Inattentive driving is a major cause of accidents.
Heads-up displays are becoming more common in motor vehicles because the driver does not need to look away from the road to get information and operate controls.
Glass works on the same principle. Typing a text message on a smartphone while driving has to be slower and more dangerous than dictating the message while not taking your eyes off the road.
As a general rule, you can always rely on a few individuals to do reprehensible things with technology, but the abuse of something should not in itself prohibit its use.
Google has a grand vision for the future: the company wants to make all of the world’s information “universally accessible and useful,” and with Google co-founder Sergey Brin as Glass’s most avid champion, it’s not hard to see where all of this is going.
On release later this year, the price is expected to be around USD$750, about the price of a top-end smartphone. But cheaper clones are already appearing.
Motorola, Sony, Epson, Chinese newcomer Baidu and others are developing similar devices that will compete with Glass.
With such an influx, wearable technology will quickly evolve and become comfortably integrated into our lives. Soon we will wonder how we ever lived without it.
David Tuffley is a lecturer in Griffith University’s School of ICT (since 1999) and a former IT industry consultant for the 15 years before that. This article first appeared on 
The Conversation.
