Majority of Americans viewed smart wearables as a change for the worse

Evidence

Privacy advocates protested the “always on” but “undetectable” recording of people and places that eliminates a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy and/or anonymity. They warned of new risks as facial-recognition software is applied to these new data streams and predicted that technologies like Glass would fundamentally alter how people behave in public. By May 2013, a congressional privacy caucus asked CEO Larry Page for assurances on privacy safeguards for Glass, even as a Google conference was held to coach developers on creating apps for the new device. In April 2014 Pew Research announced that 53 percent of Americans thought that smart wearables were “a change for the worse,” including 59 percent of American women. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 489

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘always on but undetectable’ recording dynamic echoes the standing note on small acts of decorum toward corpses lacking practical logic — the granular, ambient nature of surveillance it documents resists the practical-risk framing. — connects to: A majority of surveyed Americans reject data-collecting smart-home devices — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 1026
• SEED: Could seed an essay angle: the June 2013 congressional privacy caucus letter and the developer coaching conference happening simultaneously illustrates the political economy of platform rollout — regulation runs behind the app economy’s on-ramping.