Technology is a Queer thing it brings you great gifts from one hand and stabs you with another, while this quote is generic and true for most of the innovations in the world, the technology is right now at the epicenter. Watches have been around from decades and now certain back alley watchmakers have decided to make bucks from selling watches that help students to cheat in exam.
One can store data on this watch and it will be read out during the exams. The most ridiculous part is that the watch manufacturer is openly advertising their wares and also explicitly specifying “specifically designed for cheating in exams”, “watch for easier studying”. Moreover, the watches are laced with a small wireless earpiece, which you know is for what. Apparently, these digital watch comes with an “emergency button” in order to quickly revert from text mode to a clock face.
Authorities are concerned that stressed out students might cave in and get tempted to use the devices to cheat in the exam. Unlike the dark Internet, these watches don’t need special efforts to buy. I just Googled in “Watch to cheat in exam” and voila! The results were indeed amusing.
A particular variant of the watch offers 4GB of storage and can read out most of the text file formats. It just doesn’t end here; a more sophisticated variant needs the user to wear a glass in order to reveal the text on the watch which the examiner won’t be able to deduct. To make the matters worse, most of these gadgets are being sold on Amazon and EBay, once again reminding us of the very little control the ecommerce giants have over their sellers.
The price for these watches start at $61 and extend to the south of $75 for the advanced one, now I don’t want to dive into the details since we are not endorsing one! This entire episode is a murky reminder of how easily we can lay our hands on such stuff online and ultimately it’s the privacy and security of the individuals that is at peril. On the other hand, cheating in exams has been around for quite a while, in the 90’s it was the calculator watches and now it is this.