Grouping, Privacy, Policies, and Power: Google GlassGoogle Glass is a new technology that is expected to be completed next year. These are glasses you can wear that basically record everything you see. The glasses transmit this data to Google, which then shows the wearer relevant ads based on their surroundings. Additionally, the glasses take photos at five-second intervals. These photos are the property of Google (Keen 2013). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Andrew Keen, a British-American author and Internet entrepreneur, is strongly opposed to this technology. He says a major problem is that, for this and other products, Google has not widely announced its recent changes in privacy settings that allow Google to aggregate our data for advertising purposes. Additionally, Google does not provide an option in its policy for users to opt out of Google gathering user information (Keen 2013). I share Keen's concerns and think Google Glass and Google's new policies represent a sea change in our already technologically-heavy society. . Just as Keen says, I too fear that this is another big step towards realizing the world of Big Brother. I think privacy diminishes significantly in the digital world. It already shocks me when I'm on Facebook and ads pop up that are incredibly relevant and specific to me, like ads for my job. My entire internet history is sort of compiled to find out what I'm interested in or interested in, and my Facebook profile tries to suggest products for me to buy based on that information. The same is true for Youtube. I don't have a Youtube account, but every time I open the website, it automatically recommends songs and videos to me based on the genres of music or types of videos I commonly watch. I can't imagine how much power Google would gain over its users if Google Glass shared everything users see with Google. David Lyons explains this form of power very well: “In modern societies, people are increasingly monitored and their activities are documented and classified with a view to creating populations that conform to social norms. Knowledge of what is happening is therefore intrinsically linked to power” (Lyons 1994: 26). In Google's case, they observe people through the eyes of the same people who choose to buy and wear Google Glass. Everything that the user – and therefore also Google – sees, Google documents and uses in its information and data pool. Google “creates populations that conform to social norms”; they want to know what the average person is like; they find social norms. Google then uses its knowledge of this information for its own benefit, literally, by personalizing its advertising, which in turn targets Google's own data providers in the first place. This sharing of information with Google and advertising companies is comparable to government surveillance. and make our world “readable”. “State simplifications such as maps, censuses, cadastral lists and standard units of measurement represent techniques for capturing a vast and complex reality; for civil servants to understand certain aspects of the whole, this complex reality must be reduced to schematic categories. The only way to achieve this is to.