The NY Times reports today that Google acknowledged it had violated people’s privacy during its StreetView mapping project. Thirty-eight states had brought a case against Google on the grounds that the project resulted in people’s passwords and other personal information being unknowingly recorded by the search giant. Google has agreed to settle it by paying a $7 million fine as well as by becoming more aggressive in ensuring that its employees’ efforts don’t violate privacy and informing the public about how to avoid having their privacy compromised.

In its discussion of the settlement, the article brings up that the way now is paved for another privacy battle, this time over Google Glass. Concerns are that Google Glass eyewear also can be used to record photos, videos and audios of the wearer’s surroundings, without the permission of the individuals featured in those surroundings. With Google Glass, users can use their voice to input commands to take a picture or make a video, as well as to take steps less likely to compromise privacy, such as search for facts about landmarks or events.

How that privacy question plays out is yet to be seen. But concerns aren’t stoping the project – which was demonstrated at last week’s SXSW conference – from moving ahead. Google yesterday announced that the glasses will accommodate frames and lenses that match users’ eye prescriptions, for example.

Getting Google Glass to respond to voice commands and searches appears to leverage capabilities it has developed for its Voice Search App for Android, as well as its semantically-driven Knowledge Graph database of hundreds of millions of entities and billions of facts, and their relationships to each other.

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Last week speculation reigned about whether Google had set its sites on computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha, with the announcement that the search engine now is using WebGL technology for enhancing users’ ability to interact with complex, compound math functions. The search giant in December added 2-D graphing to its delivery of computed answers for calculations typed into its search box, and the most recent update means users now can plot and manipulate 3D graphs.

In addition to Google just wanting to own as much of search as possible – and increasingly to want to be a more semantically-enabled answer engine for user queries – discussion pointed to the fact that Wolfram Alpha is integrated with Apple’s Siri technology to help deliver factual answers to iPhone  user queries. And Google itself reportedly is working on a Siri rival in a project code-named Majel that potentially could one-up Siri when it comes to delivering answers to requested information. Not to mention the recently publicized – and both lauded and lampooned – Project Glass, which has been described here as Google’s Siri for your eyes. (See the video here.) As of February, according to the NY Times, Siri accounted for 25 percent of all searches made on WolframAlpha.

WolframAlpha decided to make some more news of its own yesterday, following an already busy first quarter that saw, among other things, the launch of Wolfram Alpha Pro, a fee-based service that lets users compute with their own data, get dynamic versions of existing Wolfram|Alpha output, and download what WolframAlpha computes as data.

Now it’s added to its repertoire a feature that provides some computational insights into the work of the immortal Bard.

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