| ▲ | derefr 20 hours ago | |
In fact, a smartwatch might be the ideal "second personal portable computer that's just for auth and banking" that is being proposed by various commentors here. Requiring that everyone carry a smartwatch (or other smartwatch-based compute nugget) around to participate in civic life is a bit less onerous than requiring everyone carry around a smartphone; smartwatches are both cheaper and smaller. And, to me at least, smartwatches are much more of an appliance than a smartphone is. Nobody's really begging to sideload apps onto their smartwatch, or to install an alternate launcher onto them, etc. Smartwatches just kind of "do what they should obviously do given the hardware design and HCI affordances" — kind of like a calculator. As a bonus, unlike smartphones, most smartwatches to this day still aren't independently connected to cellular networks; so the average wiretapped smartwatch can't be used to surveil your location and activities in quite the same way that a wiretapped smartphone can. | ||