Google Glass might be available from Net-a-Porter in June, but it's safe to say that the smart glasses haven't totally gained the trust of the public. One such distrusting man is Julian Oliver, a Berlin-based artist and member of a privacy rights group called Stop The Cyborgs. To that end, Oliver has written Glasshole.sh, a computer program that jams Google Glass and stops it from recording footage.
Oliver was inspired to create it after he read a blogpost from fellow NYU student Omer Shapira, who described his discomfort with seeing Glass-wearing visitors at his graduate show. As Oliver summarises: "It was not possible to know whether they were recording, or even streaming what they were recording to a remote service over wi-fi."
The computer script works by allowing wi-fi hotspot owners to detect when Glass is being used in their vicinity and preventing it from connecting to a wi-fi network. A mini-computer like Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone is required to run the script. By blocking wi-fi, it stops Glass from accessing cloud servers and apps; basically, it operates like a mobile phone jammer – the network disrupters popular in schools to prevent cheating on exams.
"To say 'I don’t want to be filmed' at a restaurant, at a party, or playing with your kids is perfectly OK," Oliver told WIRED. "But how do you do that when you don’t even know if a device is recording? This steps up the game."
Oliver isn't the only programmer to try to stop the spread of Glass – products like Anti-Glass claim to block any facial recognition software installed on Google Glass, while Japanese researches have developed a pair of spectacles which confuses the camera feature on Glass and prevents it from recording your face.
