Do Wearable Computers Need a Car Mode?

Cecilia Abadie rocking Glass, via TEDxOrangeCoast

Update 1/21/14: Abadie’s ticket was dismissed, according to Reuters. A judge said there was no proof her Glass was actually running while driving.

About a month ago, a California woman named Cecilia Abadie was ticketed for driving while wearing Google Glass, a story that quickly tore across the web. After winning a heap of support on her initial Google+ post and elsewhere, she announced she’d fight the ticket, and has since retained a lawyer for a January hearing.

Lawyering up for a traffic hearing isn’t common, but it just goes to show how important the case has become. According to the Associated Press, Abadie’s lawyer is going to make the rather interesting argument that Abadie’s Glass only turned on when she turned to look at the California Highway Patrol officer who pulled her over. (Glass is designed to awake from sleep mode with a head tilt.) 

For those catching up, Abadie was reportedly pulled over on suspicion of speeding, and when the California Highway Patrol officer who made the stop saw she was wearing Glass, he added a citation for a California law banning the use of video monitors in front of the driver’s seat in automobiles. The law makes specific exceptions for GPS devices, which Glass can serve as.  

But instead, she’s arguing that her Glass essentially turned on by itself (with a gesture, sure, but accidentally). Combined with the fact that Abadie’s lawyer is arguing that the California law she was cited for was written before Glass existed, this case is opening the door for a new question: If police can’t tell when a wearable is on or off, how can they enforce standing bans? In other words, do wearables need a car mode?

The traffic ticket heard ’round the Google Earth

(It’s important to note that Abadine doesn’t appear to want to argue for the legality of Glass use in cars. Glass seems at least as distracting as driving while on the phone, which is banned in California. I think it’d be hard to win an argument that, despite texts and phone calls being banned for safety reasons, using an eye computer should be legal. Distracted driving is distracted driving. But hey, I’d love for you to prove me wrong.)​ 

While this traffic case may not set precedent for wearables, laws regarding wearables will come eventually, and the attention the case has received suggests that will be sooner rather than later. And really, it’s an interesting conundrum.

Pretty much all of our distracted driving laws now are based on the fact that we’re not connected to our technology. If you’re holding a smartphone in your hand while driving, you’ll get busted for texting or calling; police know that you only hold your phone when using it, otherwise it sits somewhere else. It’s this visual ease of using/not using that makes texting and calling laws easier to enforce.

But what happens when a gadget is physically attached to you, as they’re increasingly becoming? Banning the use of something like Google Glass while driving is pretty impossible to enforce. Unlike with a phone, Glass is supposed to be on someone’s face all the time. How does an officer know when someone’s using it improperly?

That inability to prove whether Glass is on or not is what Abadie is trying to leverage to get out of her ticket, and it’s a rather smart play. But it’s also going to become clear that traffic courts can’t end up filled with people arguing whether or not their smart glasses were on or not. Something going to have to change, so what will it be?

The first option is to simply ban wearables while driving. Sorry Explorers, but since we can’t prove you’re not using your device, they have to remain off while at the wheel. This would piss off much of the Silicon Valley set I’d presume, but it’d be the easiest way out for legislators, so it’s a possible future.

Still, what about car mode? Developers of wearables could be proactive about the issue and, say, set up a GPS-locked mode for computer glasses that also comes with a time stamp to prove that the device was on car mode while the car was moving. It doesn’t really solve the problem of cops having to pull over all Glass owners to see who’s being naughty, but maybe there’s a way around that? Wireless pinging of patrol cars to say Glass is turned off? Or yeah, perhaps driving with Glass is just going to be banned.