Google Glass, the headgear which takes pictures and videos on voice command, is not being well received in San Francisco.
A woman wearing Google Glass in a San Francisco bar was attacked in the early hours. Her attackers told her “F*** Google”, and accused her of “killing this city”, before tearing the gear from her head.
The incident touched off wider debate about the growing resentment of Silicon Valley’s high tech workers who are roosting in parts of the city.
Sarah Slocum, 34, is one of several thousand “explorers” across the world road-testing Google’s latest gadget. She has embraced the technology and believes “it is the future”.
But in a dimly lit bar at 1.30 am she discovered that not everyone is as keen.
She claims she was not recording anyone or invading their privacy, but only demonstrating the device to some people. But others became agitated. She said she started to feel threatened and then started recording.
After a hiatus, someone threw a dirty bar rag at her, she said, and a woman came over and said: “You’re killing this city.”
Curses were aimed before a man snatched the device from her fact and ran out of the bar. But she followed him out and was able to recapture her Glass. On Facebook, many people sided against her for taking the device into a bar in the first place.
Bars and cafes have now started to ban Google Glass devices, saying their customers have asked for privacy, especially as you can’t tell if Google Glass is recording.
Resentment is spilling over in other areas as well. There is a great deal of anger over spiralling rents and evictions as young tech workers take up residence in previously low-income areas.
In San Francisco, 23% of residents live below the poverty threshold, according to a recent study. In December alone, rents went up by 10.6%. In the low-income Mission district, a two-bedroom flat was listed at $10,000 a month. Speculators are being blamed for buying properties, evicting long-term tenants, and then raising the rents.
Hundreds of demonstrators recently gathered outside Twitter’s headquarters to protest about tax breaks for the company.
Special streamlined buses are laid on to transport workers from the city into Silicon Valley’s tech companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple and Yahoo.
The resentment has led to pickets, bus tyres being slashed and even bricks and stones being thrown. Signs have been taped to the vehicles reading “F*** off Google”.
Last week Google donated $6.8 million to the city, which will allow underprivileged children to use public buses free of charge for the next two years.
