Will your clothing spy on you?

In his lecture “The Ethicist’s and the Lawyer’s New Clothes: The Law and Ethics of Smart Clothes,” I. Glenn Cohen, Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, warns of the potential for wearable technology to annihilate privacy for good.

According to Fortune’s David Whitford, Cohen drew an analogy with Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where the action takes place in two locales: Venice itself, a hotbed of commerce and greed; and nearby Belmont, the refuge to which the protagonists escape for love and art. Smart clothes threaten to “disrupt the place of refuge,” even when we leave our phones behind. “At some point we squeeze out the space for living a life,” he warned. “Lots of people have things they want to do and try but wouldn’t if everything was archived.”