I’ll admit it: I want a pair of Google Glass? I don’t know what I’ll do with them but I want them nonetheless. But people who’s never tried them are freaking out. “PRIVACY!” they shout. Look, I’m concerned about privacy probably a little more than your average person but not really about this device. Jon Evans has pretty much nailed it:

Sheesh. A whole lot of people who presumably have never actually seen Google Glass in action appear to be really upset. “People who wear Google Glass in public are assholes,” says Gawker’s Adrian Chen. “You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it,” doom-cries Mark Hurst.

Seriously, people? Seriously? DARPA has built drone-mounted 1.8-gigapixel cameras that can recognize people waving from 15,000 feet.Gait recognition software is good enough that they probably don’t even need to see your face. Oh, yes, and they’re working on legions of drones the size of insects, too, while they’re at it. There’s already one closed-circuit camera for every 32 people in the United Kingdom. And the NSA is building a new 65-megawatt data center in Utah to parse this brave new world of big data.

Meanwhile, everywhere you go, hardware is getting faster, software is getting better, everything is being networked. We’re marching boldly into a panopticon future. I’ve been writing about this foryears. And now, suddenly, you’re irate about the potential privacy repercussions of a few geeks bearing glasses? What is wrong with you people? Where have you been?

Read the full article @ TechCrunch.