Lifestyle

Sony Is Developing Video-Recording Contact Lenses So Say Bye To Your Privacy

by Kevin Schlittenhardt
Google

Before recently, at least you knew the geek with Google Glass standing in front of you could be recording you by the sight of his totally lame, bionic eyewear.

According to The Huffington Post, Sony filed a patent in 2013 for contact lenses people can wear that are capable of taking photos and recording video. The wearer operates the contact lenses by blinking, and the lenses do not have to be linked to a smartphone or other outside device.

Not only can the contact lenses store photographic and video data, they can also play them back for the wearer -- a feature that sounds absolutely terrifying and should serve as a future cause for many clumsy accidents.

Samsung and Google are both reportedly manufacturing similar technology. Samsung intends to use the technology to measure glucose levels in people's tears, while Google's model features a tiny camera, similar to Sony's.

So basically, what I'm trying to tell you is privacy will be extinct forever. Never go outside again.

Don't believe me? Check out this terrifying video:

By the sound of things, it seems like it'll be extremely hard to tell when someone is wearing one of these video-recording contact lenses, leaving people extremely vulnerable to being recorded without their knowledge or consent.

To put things into perspective, if you met someone during a night out on the town and took him or her back to your apartment for an intimate encounter, you would have virtually no way of knowing if he or she has been wearing these lenses the whole time.

As it stands, it is legal to record people in public without their consent, but the lines get blurry when such laws include language like "subjects have a reasonable expectation of privacy." An example used in USA Today states that while it is legal to photograph someone's house from the street -- as it can be viewed from a public place -- the house becomes illegal to photograph if the homeowner can be seen from the window, as he or she should be afforded that reasonable expectation of privacy.

As you can see, this technology definitely raises some questions on expectations of privacy and will surely cause a stir if and when this technology becomes commercially available.

But I, for one, am horrified.