Updated below with a new statement from McDonald's.
As you weigh whether to spend $1,500 on a Google Glass prototype, consider the less obvious downsides to the technology. French McDonald's employees, for instance, may spontaneously attempt to strip it off your head while you're eating a Chicken Ranch Wrap.
University of Toronto computer engineering professor Steve Mann has written a lengthy blog post that sketches a very strange collision of culture, privacy and the future of personal technology: During a recent vacation in Paris, Mann says that McDonald's employees allegedly assaulted him and tried to physically remove a Google-Glass-like wearable computing eyepiece called the EyeTap that Mann invented and has worn in various forms for 13 years.
Like Google's Glass augmented reality glasses, the experimental EyeTap both displays information in Mann's field of view and functions as a camera. Unlike Google Glass, however, this device was "permanently attached," as Mann writes, and "does not come off my skull without special tools."
As Mann and his family were sitting by the window eating, he says, a McDonald's employee pulled at the device, damaged it, then tore up a doctor's note he offered them to explain why he needed to wear it, and finally brusquely pushed him out of the restaurant.
Certain parts of this bizarre-on-many-levels story aren't explained in Mann's post, such as what medical condition requires him to wear his augmented reality device, or more importantly, why McDonald's staff had such a hostile reaction to the EyeTap. Mann didn't respond Monday night to an email I sent him. But he implies in the post that McDonald's employees may have objected to what they saw as his use of a recording device, and he points to the story of another American who claimed she was manhandled by Parisian McDonald's employees after taking a picture of the restaurant's menu and was forced to erase the photograph.
A McDonald's spokesperson wrote to me in a statement that the company "[takes] the claims and feedback of our customers very seriously. We are in the process of gathering information about this situation and we ask for patience until all of the facts are known."
Update: McDonald's has sent me a new statement, and its staff denies there was a "physical altercation" with Mann.
If the McDonald's employees' goal was to prevent surveillance in their restaurant, they failed. Mann's eyepiece took several photos that captured his alleged assailants faces and ID badges, though he's obscured them in the versions posted on his blog, instead labeling them Perpetrators 1, 2 and 3. Mann explains that the device doesn't usually record his vision. But"when the computer is damaged, e.g. by falling and hitting the ground (or by a physical assault), buffered pictures for processing remain in its memory, and are not overwritten with new ones by the then non-functioning computer vision system," Mann writes. "As a result of Perpetrator 1's actions, therefore images that would not have otherwise been captured were captured. Therefore by damaging the Eye Glass, Perpetrator 1 photographed himself and others within McDonalds."
If Mann's account holds true, then McDonald's owes him an epic apology. Reddit has already discovered Mann's post and pulled out its pitchforks and torches: By early Monday evening users had posted the personal phone numbers and email addresses of the McDonald's CEO David Thompson and other executives, though they were later deleted. One reader suggested "grinding up their wife and children into meat patties then force feeding the execs their family as Big Macs." Techcrunch didn't waste time in calling for a McDonald's boycott.
But set aside the behavior of allegedly violent fast-food luddites, and Mann's story still raises some tough questions about wearable computing and ubiquitous surveillance. After all, his device, like Google Glass, allows any user to record his or her experience with little or no indication to those being recorded. Despite writing that the EyeTap only took photos of McDonald's employees because it was damaged, Mann's work on the augmented reality gadget in the past has emphasized the technology's potential for broadcasting experiences online and focused on "sousveillance"--a counter to corporate or government surveillance that gives an individual the ability to record authority figures instead of vice versa. In one essay, he even used the term "Cyborglog" or "glog" to describe recording all of a person's experiences with a wearable computer attachment, and suggested that a "glogger Personal Safety Device (PSD) is to the individual person as the 'black box' flight recorder is to an airplane."
His insistence on recording with his EyeTap has led to plenty of run-ins with authority in the past. A Wired article from 2002 describes him being removed from a Wal-mart, as well as conflicts with the New York City police department and the Secret Service. It even describes Mann missing the premiere of a film about him at the SXSW Festival that year because airport security prevented from boarding a plane with his gadgets.
As my Forbes colleague Kashmir Hill has written, Google Glass and possible competing products from Olympus and Apple may make a "persistent, pervasive surveillance state inevitable," as the data the devices collect is subpoenaed and tracked by governments and corporations. But wearers like Mann seem bent on using them to match surveillance with sousveillance, much like the OpenWatch apps that allow anyone to secretly record audio and video from their smartphone to monitor cops and other authority figures.
As that power to keep tabs on authority increasingly comes to light, expect plenty of other establishments to take issue with wearable computing devices. In some form, the devices could actually be a force for guarding individual liberties. But unless you don't mind being thrown out of restaurants and banned from government buildings, don't bolt your Google Glass headset to your skull just yet.
