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Sergey Brin's Favorite Google Glass Feature

This article is more than 10 years old.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, sporting Glass.

During a recent trip to D.C.'s wonderful National Portrait Gallery, I started thinking about how rare it used to be for people to have images of themselves. But thanks to the ubiquity of cameras and digital photography in my lifetime, I have probably accumulated more photos of myself than exist for all of my ancestors. Sadly, there are no photos of my grandmother doing a keg stand in existence (that I know of).

That trend is only going to accelerate if products like Google Glass go mainstream -- which they're more likely to do with the likes of Diane Von Furstenberg actually making them fashionable. Google let serious techies pre-order rough early versions for $1,500 a pair. (To go mainstream, that price tag will need to be trimmed down, obviously.) The company is also letting journos give the facial computing devices a spin. Spencer Ante writes about test-driving the Glass in the WSJ. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who has overseen the development of Glass at Google's secretive X lab, actually walked Ante through the Geordi La Forge session himself. It sounds like he was a bit miffed about people calling them Google Glasses instead of Google Glass (which the GOOG prefers as there are no lenses). He also told Ante what he likes best about them: the hands-free camera.

Mr. Brin said his favorite feature is the time-lapse capability that lets him snap photos of his kids every 10 seconds when he is playing with them. "I never think about taking out my phone," he said. "That would really be disruptive to my play time."

Via The Wall Street Journal

If parents start becoming this obsessive about taking photos of their kids, we'll have to start calling them parentarazzi.

It's easy to imagine lots of other situations in which it'd be attractive to be able to snap photos all of the time, whether with friends, on the subway, on a road trip, walking down the street, at the beach, at clubs, at bars, on an airplane, while discretely following that famous person you're pretending not to photograph. Anywhere where you might capture a moment worth catching and sharing. We could all become surveillance cameras, but with legs and Instagram filters. It's easy, after all, to delete the boring pics later.

Anecdotes like Brin's are what make me think Google Glass (and the inevitable iContactLenses) make a persistent, pervasive surveillance state inevitable. At the very least, at the playground.