I don’t wear a watch. I don’t want to wear a watch. I stopped carrying a watch when I got a pager and I’d been using a pocket watch before that. I haven’t worn a watch in so long I automatically feel my pockets when someone asks what time it is. I find the concept of the smart watch completely baffling. I like the health monitoring aspects of it, and I think a lot of people can really improve their lives with that sort of data, but REALLY don’t want to share my pulse rate and such with advertisers etc. because yeah there’s more targeted advertising and stuff they can do with that than people are currently thinking about. Market researchers are going to be combing all of the data they can with that to see if there are buying trends that relate to menstrual cycles or other predictable health patterns. I mean your club card coupons already track a lot of this through your buying habits.

So let’s try a little experiment. I’m going to turn on comments for this post. What’s your take on emerging technologies? Do you think devices like smart watches are going to help people live better lives or are the marketing uses of the technology going to outweigh the benefits?