Google, as you have probably heard, presented Project Glass at their Google I/O conference in San Francisco recently. It was an early prototype of their augmented reality glasses und while this piece of technology is really exciting from a geeky point of view, the actual questions we have to ask ourselves here are:

1. Do I want this piece of technology to come from a company like Google?
2. And more importantly: Do I really want Google to literally see what I see?

The only answer to these questions can just be a loud and clear “No”! Hasn’t the software giant already collected more than enough of our most personal and most private data? Because that’s actually what they have be doing for almost a decade now. Of course they were also busy building a bunch of software and services over time, like their email service, their web-browser, even their own mobile phone operating system. And so, a lot of people were lulled by Google, even (or rather especially) software developers, who traditionally have a rather critical approach, got excited by all the “free” software and the “don’t be evil“ mumbo-jumbo.

Wait … free … no evil!? No Sir, I wouldn’t say so! What Google gets in return is worth more than the few bucks one would shell out for an equally good or better piece of software. As said before, what Google has been doing throughout the last years was collecting every single piece of data they could get their hands on. Because – let’s face it – how much has web search really improved over the last years? When I started my computer science career, search results from different engines were already quite accurate. Admittedly, these results may be a bit more accurate today, but how much has actual web search experience improved in terms of usefulness? For a simple search I still get a few good, millions of crappy and - most prominently – sponsored results! All in all, pretty much the same experience than in the late nineties, isn’t it? If Google directly gave us the one single thing we are interested in (in probably 90% of our searches) nobody would get to see advertisements and they would jeopardize their business model. So rather than investing brainpower into the effectiveness of their search results, most of that effort went into their actual business model: harvesting, aggregating and mining data and regularly coming up with clever new ways to lure people into their data collection traps.

So, should we really put our fate into a software company’s hands, that has no real business model in terms of building and selling software? Should we really get every single bit of hardware of software from them? And – to close the circle – should we get a device like Project Glass, that basically puts them into our heads making them see what we see?

Again, there can be only one answer. I have made my choice …

Anyone in doubt of my words is encouraged to read the novel “The Silicon Jungle”. Even though the characters and events in this book are fiction, the technology described in it is not and this book demonstrates very explicitly why the possession and aggregation of such huge amounts of personal data poses a big risk to all of us.