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Back in 1890 two Boston lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review warning that the invasive technologies of their day threatened to take "what is whispered in the closet" and have it "proclaimed from the house-tops." In the face of those threats, they posited a direct "right to privacy" and argued that individuals whose privacy is violated should be able to sue for damages.

Warren and Brandeis called privacy "the right to be let alone" and gave numerous examples of ways it could be invaded. After more than a century of legal scholarship, we've come to understand that these examples suggest four distinct kinds of invasion: intrusion into a person's seclusion or private affairs; disclosure of embarrassing private facts; publicity that places a person in a "false light"; and appropriation of a person's name or likeness.

9/11: The First National Scare of the Computer Age
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the terms of the debate. Suddenly, the issue was no longer whether Congress should protect consumer privacy or let business run wild. Instead, the question became: Should Congress authorize the Bush administration to use the formidable power of state surveillance to find terrorists operating inside the United States and stop them before they could carry out their next attack?

The administration itself had no doubts. Where laws protecting privacy got in the way of its plans to prevent attacks, it set out to change those laws. The pinnacle of this effort was the USA Patriot Act, signed on October 26, 2001, which dramatically expanded government power to investigate suspected terrorism. In the months that followed, representatives for the administration repeatedly denounced those who complained about threats to privacy and liberty; they were, said Attorney General John Ashcroft, "giv[ing] ammunition to America's enemies."

The roughly one in five Internet users who spend an average of 25 minutes each day on Facebook implicitly face a question every time they type into a Facebook page: Do they trust the site's security and privacy controls? The answer is inevitably yes.

That's the reason privacy activists are on Facebook: it's where the action is. It's easy to imagine a future where most personal messaging is done on such platforms. Activists and organizations that refuse to take part might find themselves irrelevant.

Second, this device points to some media characteristics that are important to distinguish. This pair of glasses in its current state overlays physical reality with an added layer of information. Just like ‘passive’ navigation devices such as TomTom, it is augmenting space with an extra level of added information. It is not creating a truly hybrid space in the sense of - following Adriana De Souza e Silva’s writings - enabling social interaction in both physical and digital spaces at the same time, which are mutually influencing each other.

Yet what if new uses are created with such a device? What if video-calls (e.g. via Skype) are possible through these pair of glasses, calls that take place both in digital space and influence the physical space and vice versa? Or if you watch Youtube video’s on this thing and immediately comment on them via your cell phone? Then this device would enable the creation of hybrid spaces. So augmented space or hybrid space it is not inherent in the technologies but always defined by the social processes in which technologies are used.