The "Mark" of the Beast - Privacy Concerns over Google Glass

"You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes."
(Deut 6:8)

Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.
(Rev 13:16-17)

 

The implications of facial recognition technology being incorporated into Google Glass has sent alarm bells ringing recently over how this will impact privacy. A beta test of Google Glass has already been available to technology pundits since April, and it is set to be made available to the public by the end of 2013.

These devices are widely considered to the "next big thing" in the technology market. There have already been concerns raised over how these computerised glasses instantly uploads the wearers' video footage to the www and Google's online databases, effectively rendering them as ubiquitous surveillance devices.

An article from the Daily Mail highlights these concerns below:

...of all the promised features of these spectacular specs, it is the glasses’ ability to take pictures and shoot video footage and upload it instantly to the internet that is proving most disturbing.
Some fear candid camera snooping will become all too easy when no one realises that the person simply looking in their direction is actually filming them.
And it gets worse.
According to Google  co-founder Sergey Brin, the company plans to have Google Glass fitted with an automatic picture-taking mode, snapping photos at pre-set intervals. This could be as often as every five seconds.
While people may rightly worry about being photographed without their knowledge or permission, such fears pale into insignificance when you consider the true extent of the insidious reach of Google Glass.
Time and again, Google has proved that it has no time for that quaint old concept called ‘privacy’.
The company already knows where its users are — by keeping tabs on where computer and smartphone searches originate — and what they are looking for.
The company analyses emails sent to and from Google email accounts, photographs people’s houses and back gardens as part of its Street View mapping project, and — as the company admitted in the U.S. last week — has looted passwords and medical and financial information by snooping on unprotected wi-fi accounts.
With Google Glass, soon it will know precisely what Google users are seeing at any given moment.
And never forget that Google Glass’s raison d’etre is to make money for a company which boasts the motto ‘Don’t Do Evil’ — while selling every last byte of private information it can to advertisers and retailers.
You may wonder why such a firm would be interested in footage of you, say, doing something as mundane as your supermarket shopping.
The answer is simple. Retailers are keen to find out such information as which shelves we look at first.
A pair of Google Glass spectacles in film mode will tell them precisely that and, once the data from millions of users is aggregated, they will be able to position their products accordingly. 
You may already have been filmed unknowingly by someone with Google Glass — one of those lucky guinea pigs hand-picked to try out the developing technology.
If not, rest assured you soon will be. A growing number of industry insiders say we should all be very worried.
Scott Cleland, an internet analyst, told me ‘creepy’ Google Glass technology represented the ‘ultimate escalation of Google’s privacy invasion’.
He says: ‘Say you’re huddled in Starbucks with your spouse and someone next to you is recording your conversation on Google Glass.
Remember, the glasses have no storage capacity so all the information goes directly back to Google’s huge data centres.’
Nick Pickles, of the UK privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, says Google Glass ‘makes CCTV cameras look trivial . . . the person next to you isn’t just a commuter any more, they’re a Google agent’.
Mark Hurst, of Creative Good, a New York company that specialises in improving customer experiences, sees a dystopian future in which Google will play all too prominent a role. 
He predicts that ten years from now, if a company or organisation wants to know if you have ever said anything they consider offensive or threatening, a single search query on Google’s database ‘will instantly bring up documentation of every word you’ve ever spoken within earshot of a Google Glass device’.
Perhaps we should follow the lead of a Seattle bar which has announced a pre-emptive ban on customers wearing Google Glass.
The owner of 5 Point said his clientele were ‘not the sort of people who want to be secretly filmed and immediately put on the internet’.
Google — with its talking, stalking goggles — increasingly feels as if it, too, has come out of a futuristic film.
It’s the corporate version of Big Brother: a creepy, octopus-like global behemoth watching, assimilating and exploiting everything we do and see. 
(Tom Leonard, "Google's Sinister Glasses will Turn the Whole World into the Search Giant's Spies", The Daily Mail, 18th March, 2013, read the full article here)


With the future addition of facial recognition technology however, this would take this invasion of privacy to a whole new level, allowing anyone wearing these glasses to instantly access the online information of anyone standing in front of them. With the introduction of facial recognition technology, a wearer of Google Glass would be able to immediately access information such as a person's Facebook account, just by looking at them, and have all their personal data floating around in their field of vision. Although Google have stalled their plans on incorporating facial recognition on Google Glass for now, it is widely believed that the future introduction of this technology is inevitable - especially if it is being offered by competitors.
It is easy to imagine how this technology could be exploited by a future dystopian government - being used not only to gather and disseminate personal information, but also to spy on anyone in the immediate vicinity of someone wearing these devices. As one commentator notes:

Privacy advocates are concerned that users wearing Google Glass could walk into a bar and immediately spot who is in the room based on running a facial recognition check, while some see that a harmless or even useful, others are worries of the implications that might have in a wider social context.
"I like the idea of openness, however, as long as there are Governments and leaders with power in the world there should be no way that we allow these kind of innovations," says commentor Martijn Potman on the news following the announcement. "Imagine (excuse me for this) Hitler in World War II with Google Glass v10 with heat/night etc vision and face recognition. The Jewish people would not have had a chance...
(Stuart Miles, "Google: Glass won't have facial recognition powers for now". Pocket-lint. Read the full article here)

Never mind Hitler, imagine this technology in the hands of the Antichrist...

In my book Unveiling the Apocalypse, published in July 2011 (well before Project Glass was first announced in April 2012), I had noted that renowned futurist Dr. Michio Kaku had predicted that computerised TV glasses would be the next major step forward in mobile technology. I used this to explain how the "mark" of the Beast could be worn on the forehead as a "frontlet band", in line with the way Jewish phylacteries are worn in accordance with Deut 6:8. If cell phones are the fulfilment of the prophecy of the mark of the Beast (as I also argue in an earlier post here), then it logically followed that the only way this technology could be worn on the forehead like the "frontlet bands" of Scripture, would be through the invention of computerised glasses. The inherent eavesdropping and government surveillance capabilities of this technology goes far beyond anything that can be gathered from any microchip implant. And the fact that these devices are worn for long periods directly upon the forehead would also put the user at greater risk from increased exposure to the potential cancer inducing effects of electromagnetic radiation. Although they won't replace or overtake cell phones in popularity, they have enough unique features to warrant using them in tandem with owning a mobile phone, and they are certain to become increasingly popular as the production costs are eventually lowered in the future.


See also the earlier posts on this subject:
www and 666: the "Mark" on the Forehead?
Cell Phones vs RFID Implants as the "Mark" of the Beast