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The Great Wearables Privacy Dilemma
Will slicker new wearables enable helpful technology or just fuel a privacy nightmare?
The other day tech writer Clive Thompson wrote an excellent piece for this platform entitled “Wearable Computers Should Never Have Cameras.” Thompson’s piece was prompted by news of Facebook’s collab with Ray-Bans — surely an effort to create wearables that finally attain the cool factor. And I agree with every point he makes there about the privacy issues inherent with embedding cameras in wearable devices.
As he concluded, quite fairly, “Big tech firms have no interest in building technology that actually helps you think, which was the original vision of wearable computers. They just want you to wear something that feeds content to their ad-supported social networks.”
Similarly, the anthropologist S.A. Applin asks, “How will we feel going about our lives in public, knowing that at any moment the people around us might be wearing stealth surveillance technology?” Sure, she concedes, “People have recorded others in public for decades, but it’s gotten more difficult for the average person to detect, and Facebook’s new glasses will make it harder still, since they resemble and carry the Ray-Ban brand.”
