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.”
So Facebook hopes we embrace surveillance chic then.
Now, some will argue that we already carry cameras everywhere we go, which essentially allow for the same privacy incursions—much as we already carry tracking devices everywhere we go in the form of mobile phones, so hardly need to be injected with tracking chips.
As both Thompson and Applin note, the problem is the form factor for these wearables makes it even more difficult to determine whether someone is recording you or not. Sure, reviewers have noted, there’s a quick snap sound, and a tiny LED light blips on. But both features could easily go unnoticed. And it can’t be too difficult to obscure the already modest little white light, which to me, looks more like a power indicator than a recording indicator. Check out this video from Ray-Ban Films to see for yourself.
