The Dark Side of Health Trackers

Say you’ve received a brand-new Fitbit for Christmas to get you started in tracking your exercise routine and reach your fitness goals. Great! However, there might be more going on behind the scenes of you keeping fit with the help of technology than meets the eye...

Just like the Jedi Order's Light and Dark side of The Force, health trackers also have contrasting sides akin to the Sith and the Jedi, and you might have unintentionally signed a pact with the dark side already… In hindsight, it might have been a better idea to have asked for a LEGO Millennium Falcon instead...

The Medical Futurist, we’re great fans of wearables (or health trackers) that help you make more informed decisions when it comes to your health. However, we can’t stay indifferent to the potential risks which using these devices entail such as individual tracking, inaccuracies and even supplementing harmful behaviors.

If you were oblivious about the flip side of the health-tracking industry, then join us as we explore the lesser-known, darker side of wearables.

Cyborgs under surveillance

While fitness trackers are practically turning us into cyborgs, they are also increasingly allowing us to be tracked in ways we might not be aware of. In an eye-opening piece published last December, the New York Times showed how, by using only a fraction of location data obtained from a location data company mining that information from various apps, they could track and identify people from military officials to Hollywood stars. A singer whose activities they tracked couldn’t even name the app that might have collected the data used, even though she was careful about limiting how she shared her location.

Find the dots, connect the dots. Even if the data is anonymized, in today's world AI and algorithms will compare data from one source with another, and derive a statistical likelihood that the data is yours.

If you consider that the global number of connected wearable devices is expected to amount to over 1.1 billion in 2022, then you are very likely to be among the owner of such a device that might be giving away your location history to potentially unscrupulous third parties...

For tighter control over the data collected, the same authors of the New York Times article shared 3 quick steps that you can take. These include manually stopping location tracking by apps, disabling mobile ad ID and switching off location sharing in your Google account. Where applicable, you can also set up two-factor authentication on your accounts.

If you’re using a fitness tracker to better monitor and/or attend to a medical condition, you should do so under the guidance of a medical professional. Moreover, any aberrant results you might come across should be cross-checked with a professional.

Be sure to check out our Health Sensors & Trackers articles for more in-depth discussions and reviews of the latest devices.

 The Dark Side of Health Trackers | LinkedIn