Google bans Glass porn apps (goodbye ‘Tits and Glass’ app)

The term “glassholes” almost got an entirely new meaning today, as the first porn app for Google Glass was released. And was banned almost as quickly.

Porn company Mikandi (NSFW, in case you couldn’t guess), which calls itself the world’s top app store for porn, released “Tits and Glass” this morning. A very classy title of course, as befits the porn industry. The app was designed to make “authentic” porn, whatever that means, allowing users to create, upload, and share photos — but not videos, oddly — taken with Glass.

“Unlike other hands-free recording devices, wearing Glass is easy and familiar,” MiKandi co-founder Jennifer McEwen told Mashable. “Because of that, you can forget about the technology on your head and be in the moment. The result is an authentic look at the wearer’s experiences.”

Google, apparently, is not a fan.

The company changed its Glass Platform Developer Policies to ban porn apps:

Sexually Explicit Material: We don’t allow Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. Google has a zero-tolerance policy against child pornography. If we become aware of content with child pornography, we will report it to the appropriate authorities and delete the Google Accounts of those involved with the distribution.

The result, as Mikandi posted on its blog, is that the app will need to “change.” How it can continue to be a porn app without “nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material” is a bit of a mystery, but others have sort of managed it on the Apple app store (hello, Playboy).

Jesse Adams, CEO of Mikandai, said that Google gave no warning of this new provision:

When we received our Glass and started developing our app 2 weeks ago, we went through the policy very carefully to make sure we were developing the app within the terms. We double checked again last week when making the site live on the Internet and available for install for testing during last week’s announcement. We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified by Google. We also double checked our emails to see if any notifications of policy changes were announced, but we haven’t found any such emails.

This is clearly a smart decision by Google. While porn is often an early adopter stimulus (hmm) for new technology, Google does not want Glass to become known as the personal porn device. And just imagine the legal and ethical issues that could arise from a poorly coded app, accidental recording, and mistakenly uploaded photos.

Much better to leave those worms firmly in the can.