Google Glass has been heralded as the gateway to an augmented world, where people are assisted in a deeply immersive way as they go about their lives, or as a dead-end device like the Segway, that seemed a breakthrough but wound up only being used by airport policeman and tour guide businesses.

The actual implications of the possibilities and problems of the tools of augmented reality — or the augmentarium — are perhaps perfectly bracketed by two stories I encountered only a few hours apart earlier this week.

In the first, Richard Byrne Reilly reports that the New York City Police Department is evaluating the use of Google Glass, and others are considering it:

The New York City Police Department’s massive and controversial intelligence and analytics unit is evaluating whether Google Glass is a decent fit for investigating terrorists and helping cops lock up bad guys, VentureBeat has learned. The department recently received several pairs of the modernist-looking specs to test out.

“We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we’re trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes,” a ranking New York City law enforcement official told VentureBeat.

“We’re looking at them, you know, seeing how they work.”

There are two dimensions of Glass in policing. First, assisting the officer wearing the Glass in routine police work, such as facial recognition of people. And even without that AI-ish capability, police could access information about suspects using voice commands instead of typing on smartphones or tablets. The second dimension is monitoring what officers are doing, saying, and seeing. This could be very helpful in confrontations with lawbreakers. But just as importantly, a great deal of research has shown that putting always-on cameras on police officers and recording their interactions with citizens has led to a significant drop in complaints about abusive behavior.

Note that everything stated in the preceding paragraph regarding police using Glass holds for other workers that deal with the public, such as retail clerks, flight attendants, bus and cab drivers, medical staff, and government clerks, to name only a few examples, with perhaps the obvious exception of dealing with lawbreakers. But the benefits for these workers to be able to access customer or citizen information about customers or citizens would be a real benefit, and the possibility of others being able to assist or monitor the interactions between staff and the public is potential a game changer.

However, this poses real issues of privacy.

The first and perhaps most contentious issue is facial recognition itself. Many people are concerned that the power  of Google Glass — or other computing devices — to be facially recognize a person as they traverse a public square — or even when shopping in a private space like a mall, store, or restaurant — goes beyond some privacy boundary, even if the software is accessing public information on Flickr, Facebook, or Instagram.

In the second story, we have the opposition to facial recognition manifested in the form of Senator Al Franken, who opposes such capabilities:

Adi Robertson, Senator Al Franken asks Google Glass developer to limit scope of facial recognition app

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) has spoken out against a Google Glass app that uses facial recognition to identify strangers. Yesterday, Franken published an open letter to the makers of NameTag, an app meant to match people’s faces with photos from social media accounts or other online sources. “Unlike other biometric identifiers such as iris scans and fingerprints, facial recognition is designed to operate at a distance, without the knowledge or consent of the person being identified,” he wrote. “Individuals cannot reasonably prevent themselves from being identified by cameras that could be anywhere — on a lamppost across the street, attached to an unmanned aerial vehicle, or, now, integrated into the eyewear of a stranger. ”

Because of Google’s across-the-board ban on facial recognition, NameTag isn’t an officially sanctioned Google Glass app. Nonetheless, it’s currently available in beta, and the claims on its website are sweeping. “NameTag can spot a face using Google Glass’ camera, send it wirelessly to a server, compare it to millions of records and in seconds return a match complete with a name, additional photos and social media profiles,” says the description. Right now, it appears to work with social media accounts, but the company behind it says it’s also working on a system to scan profiles from dating sites and criminal databases like the National Sex Offender Registry.

We haven’t tried the app, so it’s not clear how well this actually works — the experimental nature of Glass lends itself to apps that promise a lot more than they can reasonably deliver. Creator Kevin Alan Tussy, though, seem to hope for exactly the kind of system Franken fears. “A user can simply glance at someone nearby and instantly see that person’s name, occupation and even visit their Facebook, Instagram or Twitter profiles in real-time,” the site says.

Clearly, if tools like NameTag only identify people that opt into them — and only at times and places that they themselves designate — then Google and others would have less grounds for their arguments. For example, a group of young men out on the town might explicitly enable recognition for the evening to people they already know in their social networks, or to other non-employees who are in the clubs they are visiting, but not to people on the street as they walk around.

In the business setting, a company might adopt a policy that encourages employees to opt into facial recognition by other employees while in business facilities, and while traveling on business, such as conferences and customer meetings. This would be very helpful. Consider getting on the elevator in a company building, and seeing a colleague you only vaguely remember from a conference a few years ago. The NameTag app — or any alternative — could fetch up the contact’s name, the date and location of the last face-to-face meeting, and references to any other communications. So you could both cordially say ‘Good morning, John’ or ‘Betty’, without any hesitation. Similar benefits fall out of other commonplace business scenarios, like large meetings, or visiting other company facilities.

A can see why many might agree with Senator Franken, but I don’t believe that people have an expectation of going unidentified when moving around in public or private spaces. There are statutes in most states that prohibit people from wearing masks to conceal their identities, often called anti-Klan statutes, although they are not limited to Klan regalia. These are written to preclude Holloween and similar events, but are intended to maintain public order by making it easier to identify people.

And similarly, people cannot stop others from taking a photograph that includes them in public places. This has been contested in courts many times, and the Supremes have ruled that in public places people have no expectation of privacy, and therefore we can take pictures there of anything we can see. (One caveat is taking a telephoto shot of a private property while standing on public property, which might allow a photographer to catch a shot of someone who does have an expectation of privacy.) Note also that malls are open to the public and are public space with regard to photography, and with regard to our personal use of those photographs.

In essence, the courts have leaned toward publicy in these findings: that in the public sphere, our faces — our identities — are not private information, like other things are, like what is in our pockets, what is our destination, or what is on our minds.

So, I morally favor opt-in facial recognition, but I think the law might rule that — even without opting in — people cannot expect to have a reasonable expectation that their identity is a secret, locked away in the equivalent of a private place, as they walk down the street. Not when hundreds or thousands of photos are accessible that clearly establish their identity.