Six years later, it’s still fun to make fun of Google Glass. A reference to Google Glass is shorthand for hubris, foolishness, a tech company completely missing the mark on what regular human beings like. Glass represents everything we love to mock about Silicon Valley — a bunch of nerds making ugly products that nobody actually wants to use.

But where many people see Google Glass as a cautionary tale about tech adoption failure, I see a wild success. Not for Google of course, but for the rest of us. Google Glass is a story about human beings setting boundaries and pushing back against surveillance — a tale of how a giant company’s crappy product allowed us to envision a better future.

Rose Eveleth is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

The main critique of Google Glass wasn’t really that they looked stupid (although, to be clear, they did). People were kicked out of bars for wearing Glass because the device represented a form of ubiquitous recording. Glass was outfitted with a camera that the user could activate at any time, and this, rightfully, freaked people out. The New York Times ran a front-page story about Glass, wondering whether it would mean the end of privacy as we know it. A group cheekily named Stop the Cyborgs pushed against Glass "to stop a future in which privacy is impossible and central control total." Even the bar in Seattle that briefly became famous for banning Glass did so in part because of a existing policy that forbid patrons from taking videos or photos without consent. (And because doing so would get them media attention and perhaps some new customers.)

So when Google ultimately retired Glass, it was in reaction to an important act of line drawing. It was an admission of defeat not by design, but by culture.

These kinds of skirmishes on the front lines of surveillance might seem inconsequential — but they can not only change the behavior of tech giants like Google, they can also change how we’re protected under the law. Each time we invite another device into our lives, we open up a legal conversation over how that device's capabilities change our right to privacy. To understand why, we have to get wonky for a bit, but it’s worth it, I promise.

In the United States, the laws that dictate when you can and cannot record someone have a several layers. But most of these laws were written when smartphones and digital home assistants weren’t even a glimmer in Google’s eye. As a result, they are mostly concerned with issues of government surveillance, not individuals surveilling each other or companies surveilling their customers. Which means that as cameras and microphones creep further into our everyday lives, there are more and more legal gray zones.

At the federal level, the Wiretap Act makes it illegal to deliberately intercept and record other people’s phone calls or emails. When it’s your own conversations, though, things get a bit more tricky. The Wiretap Act says that as long as one party knows that a call is being recorded, then it is no longer considered wiretapping. Which means that one side can legally record a call, even if the other party has no idea they’re being recorded. This is called “one-party consent” and means just that: Only one party has to consent to a recording. Some states have laws that act on top of the federal one and increase the requirement for recording to “two-party consent” — which, again, is just what it sounds like: All parties must consent to any recording.

As cameras and microphones creep further into our everyday lives, there are more and more legal gray zones.

But there are now plenty of cases that fall outside the specifics of these federal and state laws. Let’s say you’re on the phone with someone and you think it’s just the two of you, but in fact they have you on speakerphone in their office and a third person is listening. Is that a violation of wiretapping laws? It’s not explicitly clear. The Wiretap Act also doesn’t stipulate what should happen if you’re in a bar and someone with Google Glass walks in and records you, with or without your knowledge. Or take the case of #PlaneBae, a viral story about two people whose airplane meet-cute was documented by the person sitting behind them, without permission. The woman who was photographed on the plane wound up harassed and hounded off social media. If she had been filmed or their conversation had been recorded against her will, would she have any kind of case for the invasion of her privacy? The short answer is: It’s unclear. It would take a case brought before a judge to find out.