Google's motto is "don't be evil", a motto that Google has never and will never live up to. Google's motto is at best, misdirection, and at worse, the exact opposite of what Google actually represents. Take for instance, the development of Google Glass, a device that is wearable as an integral component attached to a person's eyeglass frame that records everything within its field of vision, to which this recording is capable of being transmitted in "real -time" to a designated receiving station so as to allow those people stationed remotely to analyze that video for their own purposes, including but not limited to correlating that video with a comprehensive facial recognition database that will identify persons within the viewfinder. This, my friend, is the type of device that police stations and authoritarian regimes salivate to get their hands upon, a device that will allow them to track, correlate, and to apprehend peoples that the State desires to harass, to intimidate, arrest, or to do deliberate harm to.
Although Google glass was ostensibly created for certain privileged people by Google, it is also a product that because of its inherent intrusiveness but relatively benign appearance is easily translatable to police departments. Google glass, far from being a device that is a servant to the people, is essentially a device that was created as a "stalking horse" for police agencies, to which the true objective of implementing Google glass is to generate both publicity as well as favorable feedback through the media and social media, before its intended purpose, is released, which is to make normal the usage of this dangerous device into the hands of police agencies throughout America.
While it is true that police departments often using recording devices, those devices to date, have not been "smart" devices, that is to say, that they simply record, while Google Glass on the other hand, is a smart device, that has a user-actuated touchpad that can launch specific apps, and those apps can be directed to disseminate specific information about people, using facial recognition, or information via a person's driver's license to ascertain in real-time as to whether that person has an outstanding warrant or other applicable actionable data, or an automobile's license plate number to determine whether that vehicle has any violations associated with it, and so forth.
To make matters even worse, for citizens of America, it is not a bridge too far to take today's passive recording devices that are located at key intersections and the like, and to strategically replace these with devices akin to Google's glass, that enable operators behind the scenes to thereby train these devices upon citizens and their artifacts in such a manner, as to obtain actionable information against citizens, and thereby to act upon them.
The problem with Google glass in a private citizen's hand, especially those of a somewhat "nerdy" or scientific type, may not be that much of a problem, as long as they are both easily identifiable and it is also clearly established when they are actually recording, because they may very well not desire to be or to do evil, and hopefully, when confronted or questioned, they will, as matter of courtesy and common humanity, turn the device off when requested to do so. The police, on the other hand, and their affiliates, will turn off, edit, erase, manipulate, and destroy recordings only when it impugns them and their viewpoint, and will never be satiated in their lust to record all and to process all, because to them, we are all the enemy.