On the evening of July 4, Chris Barrett went out along the Jersey Shore Boardwalk to catch some fireworks and enjoy the summer evening.

What he didn’t expect, however, was to become the first person to capture a small-time street fight and arrest on Google Glass. Barrett, a public relations consultant and filmmaker, edited and posted the incident to YouTube. The footage itself is fairly unremarkable—a number of people milling about along the boardwalk, a few young men getting in a minor scuffle, and two men getting cuffed. But in the days since, Barrett's video has been watched more than 230,000 times.

The viral life of Barrett's work is remarkable (by contrast, his Glass video of a hole-in-one at miniature golf from the next day has less than 800 views). What's even crazier though, is that few people, if any, seem aware that they’re being filmed in close range during the four-minute-plus video.

“I think 99 percent of the people at the Jersey Shore did not know what I was wearing," Barrett told Ars. "I got a lot of stares."

To that point, Christophe Gevrey, the head of editorial solutions for Thomson Reuters, writes on his own website that this video indicates a “rapidly approaching future where everything can be filmed serendipitously by folks wearing devices like Google Glass without the knowledge of the parties involved." To put it another way, The Atlantic offers a catchier phrase. “If the NSA is big brother, Glassholes are the new little brother.”

“When you hit record, you don’t know what you’re going to catch”

Barrett seems largely positive about the experience. Based on the title of his upload, he clearly wants to trumpet the fact that he captured the event: “The First Fight & Arrest Caught on Glass.” The point is hammered home in the video’s notes, “This video is proof that Google Glass will change citizen journalism forever.”

“I guess it’s exciting, first of all, to have access. To have Google Glass is very exciting. Being part of Google explorer is very cool,” he told Ars. “People have stopped me in stores. I think just to have this tool is kind of like ‘I’m here from the future’—being able to show people what the future is like. It's kind of scary, I guess. After all, this isn’t a small company releasing a small tool.”

Barrett isn't sure how the reaction to his video will change how he uses Glass going forward. But the accidental crime-spotter said he was “glad” to “create a conversation around privacy." He used that exact phrasing multiple times over the course of a 20-minute phone call without a noticeable opinion on it in either direction.

“I’m sure in certain situations I wouldn’t have recorded this, and maybe the next time I see someone get arrested, I will keep walking,” he added. “What is interesting from this video—and what made me want to upload it—was that I was filming before this event even happened. It would have been a little different if I saw the fight, hit record, and ran right up to the fight. We’re living a life where exciting and crazy and happy and sad things happen every minute. When you hit record, you don’t know what you’re going to catch in the next 24 frames or five minutes. When Google Glass has a hard drive and battery life that is capable of recording 24 hours a day and has the capability of being always-on, that will be a very strange world. Anyone can capture any moment. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, [but] it’s interesting to me.”

When Barrett caught the action on film, he said it was during his first extended use of Glass in public. Since then, he hasn’t worn it in the last two days. To Barrett, there isn’t enough of a compelling reason to wear it consistently despite his experience of witnessing this fight. In fact, he says that usually it’s too distracting.

“Personally I haven’t worn Google Glass in the last two days,” he said. “I haven’t worn it because I had work to do and I couldn’t give people demos [while sitting at Starbucks.]”

In a world with a slowly increasing number of people wearing Google Glass or other similar devices, Barrett's video is enough to make anyone stop and think. And for future unknowing video subjects, he offers one bit of advice from the experience.

“If people are in public and laws aren’t being broken, I think you just have to be aware of exactly what you’re doing in public and hopefully you don’t do something that stands out,” he said.