This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at U Toronto chapter.

Since our lives have become more and more digitalized, people seem to have forgotten that there’s a thing called privacy. More and more things are shared online that you and I would previously only share in a private setting with friends and family.

Recently, I read about a new technology called the EQ-Radio that wirelessly reads and measures what someone is feeling. The device sends out a signal to the human body, which bounces back, and then measures what you’re feeling through your breathing and heart rate.

That’s potentially creepy. It’s not like some gimmicky, cheap magic eight ball or mood ring. It’s also accurate 87% of the time, which is the same accuracy rate as if you had those wires physically strapped to you.

The machine can tell if you’re happy, angry, sad, and can measure your emotions without even having you know about it.

Doesn’t that sort of cross a boundary there, or am I just thinking too much?

You can talk to your friends and family, or even a therapist about how you feel, and the very fact that you’re opening up and deciding to share these details shows that you trust that person. What if someone doesn’t actually tell you how they’re feeling, but you know how they feel anyway with the help of this new device?

The Smartphone and What We Use it For

In the deep-dark corners of the internet (actually, not so deep at all) you can find people who take pictures of other people without their consent and then post them online to laugh at them. Think of those pictures of customers at Wal-Mart who dress really sloppily and thus become the fodder for people to laugh at online.

Or that one guy from Target – Alex: he was this young cashier who had a picture taken of him by a teen girl who thought he was really good looking. She had no qualms about posting this picture of him online despite the fact that he didn’t even know her.

Since the internet will go crazy over anything, this guy went viral. All was fine and dandy until I remembered that his girlfriend was getting death threats from “Alex from Target” fanatics.

So, as you can see, people don’t know their boundaries when it comes to the smartphone and what they can and can’t do with them. Or rather, they just choose to ignore those boundaries. In this case, at least it was only a picture, and he did seem happy with the attention at the beginning.

The article from CBC mused that the EQ-Radio emotion-reading technology might eventually become compatible with smartphone technology. As you can probably guess, that doesn’t sound like such a good idea.

At least a picture shows what is externalized. Showing what is inside seems like a major privacy breach. Imagine: with just a feature on your smartphone, you’d know exactly how someone feels. That means they can’t hide anything, and they don’t have any place to themselves where they can potentially think what they want.

Social Media and Boundaries

I remember the awkwardness I feel when browsing my Facebook sometimes, especially because of how much information people seem to share when the whole world can see it.

It’s the equivalent of seeing a married couple having a really loud argument in the middle of a store and deciding to jump in. In real life, you’re generally advised not to make eye contact or glance at them, get your business done, and leave as soon as possible because they’re making a scene.

No one gives a second thought to jumping in when it’s the comment section of a Facebook post. Even though it’s a public argument, we’ll sometimes give the post a second or third glance, even though we wouldn’t to the married couple in the store.

But when it comes to a feeling that is private – something that only the person feeling it has access to – the EQ-Radio seems to cross a few more boundaries, especially if it does eventually become attached to a smartphone that we don’t use responsibly.

Too Much Information?

Luckily, the EQ-Radio has a “consent mechanism”; if someone makes a certain motion, it means they consent to having their emotions read.

However, it still brings up important questions about how people should be able to choose whether to divulge their feelings or not. To me, the pictures taken of completely random strangers and online arguments seem a little insane, but to essentially make someone’s poker face useless seems too far.

It’s a bit of a conundrum that we don’t think twice about sharing a comment online while being conscious about shouting something in public. I think we should change our own attitudes and conduct ourselves differently online. Instead of being so open, think about how someone else would feel reading or looking at what you shared. Would you want your own photographs posted online withour your consent? Would any random person want to read about the intimate details of your last argument with your mom?

Maybe we should start drawing lines and thinking “too much information” more often to change our own attitudes and how we conduct ourselves.