Yes, Bartlett incorporated a lie detector into the facial recognition technology. This technology promises to catch in the act anyone who tries to fake a given emotion or feeling. Facial recognition is evolving into emotional recognition, but computers—not just people—are the ones deciding what's real. ( If we add voice detection to face recognition, we end up with a complete lie detection package.)

Technology and the Right to Lie

So we can begin to imagine a near future in which we’re equipped with glasses that not only recognize faces and voices, but also truths and lies—a scenario that would provoke a revolution in human interaction. It would also constitute a serious limitation on the individual’s autonomy. Let’s start with the implications of this technology at the level of social behavior and move on to analyze the implications at the individual level.

At the collective level, the occasional “little white lie”—like the one that leads us to say, “what a beautiful baby” when in reality you think it is very ugly, or that “the soup is marvelous,” when in reality you know it tastes like bleach—is much more than a high-minded lie; it is a fundamental institution in the art of social survival and coexistence. Behind these small but strategic falsehoods hide critical social conventions. The quasi-protocol statement “we should do lunch sometime,” when our desire is to never see the person again in our life, or the enthusiastic interjection, “I love your dress,” when we’d never be caught dead wearing it even as pajamas, are actually elements of cordiality and signs of respect that shape and embellish our social interactions. They are, in most cases, well-intentioned, and offered by someone who only wants to be considerate, respectful, or simply nice. It is a social game we all play and it suits us just fine.

At the individual level, the freedom to not tell the truth is an essential prerogative of our autonomy as human beings. What this technology jeopardizes is something that goes beyond the simple impossibility of lying without being caught. This technology represents an assault on our right to privacy, our right to identity, and our right to freedom of expression—which encompasses not just what we choose to say, but what we choose to keep to ourselves.

By making it possible to determine that what we say and how we express ourselves corresponds to what we effectively think and feel, we will enter into a new dimension of the violation of our privacy; a violation that attacks the most intimate aspect of our being: our thoughts and our feelings.

This new technology heightens surveillance capabilities—from monitoring actions to assessing emotions—in ways that make an individual ever more vulnerable to government authorities, marketers, employers, and to any and every person with whom we interact. We can expect, in this future, a new wave of technologies that will violate not only the privacy of our actions, but also the privacy of our emotions. Not only will it be difficult to hide where we go, what we do, and what we buy—but also what we feel and think.