Ethics Of Wearable Technology

Google-ly Eyed Spies: The Ethics of Wearable Tech The past few years have seen the emergence of wearable tech: the rise of “smart” watches and glasses is upon us. Wearable tech is a category of tech that includes devices that are worn by consumers. These watches and glasses often include chips that can track movement, wellness, and fitness. Wearables have been developed to provide consumers with beneficial accessibility to information and health notifications while on the go. While wearable tech presents the opportunity for enriching users ' daily lifestyles by using sensors and visuals to optimize and improve their daily routines, the emergence of wearable tech has also presented the potential to negatively affect the social mannerisms …show more content…
The nature of wearable technologies provides massive privacy and ethical implications in both social and professional occasions. Google’s failure hasn’t stopped new innovators from making their own attempts. Companies such as Snapchat (now known as just “Snap”), Sony, Vue, and more are creating their own glasses. Most, if not all, of these new devices have an embedded camera in order to give the devices the ability to record from a first person point of view. While recording your memories digitally instead of using a not-so accurate photographic memory may seem appealing, it presents a plethora of issues. Smart Glasses and other forms of wearable tech now allow for people to record anything and everything, with extreme accuracy. In social situations, the idea of being recorded on camera is enough to make most people feel uneasy or uncomfortable. To make things worse, normally when an individual is recording, they are extremely noticeable because they are required to hold up a camera or phone; yet, with wearable tech the recorder can often go unnoticed. Therefore, individuals can now be recorded without their permission or knowledge of the act. For this reason, wearable tech that offers recording capabilities has come under fire for being ethically, and in some cases legally, wrong. Randy Cohen, an author of two books on ethics and the creator of the “New York Times Ethicist Column” (Cohen) argued “that recording your time walking around outside is fine, but capturing your interactions with other people is wrong, unless you explicitly tell them that you’re filming” (Piltch). Cohen makes the fair case that having a camera to record is not wrong in itself, but rather the way in which individuals use the camera is wrong. Cohen further pleas that recording social interactions are “wrong to do, and it is some kind of deceit” because “the assumption