Wearables, they are super trendy… and the info they contain is lucrative on the black market as well.
They’re the coolest thing since a Swatch Watch (if you are old enough to remember those) and they have taken the IoT by storm. An estimated 275 million wearables will be sold in 2016 alone.
Whether you’re the first of your friends to buy the latest and greatest in tech or you sit back and see which vendor will rise to the top, we should all pause and take a moment to think about the personal information we are sharing.
Let’s take a look at what info those wearables are storing, or more precisely what they are storing in their cloud software.
So, you sync your device to your phone to see how you slept and the result was poorly. You get up and head to the coffee shop to get yourself going for the morning. That extra shot of espresso increases your heart rate, which is recorded by your wearable. You skip lunch because of a meeting. On your way home you get stuck in Austin traffic, which increases your stress level (another data point recorded by your wearable) so you decide to skip the gym and head to happy hour for some relief. A few beers later and you decide your starving so you order pizza. Now let’s say you do this 2-3 times a week over the next month. What does your wearable begin to show? Basically that your poor sleep, lack of exercise and bad eating habits have led to your weight gain, increased blood pressure and overall health issues. Not something you probably want shared. Especially since one day if a company decided to sell this information (your information) you could face a rise in insurance costs or worse, a cancellation.
As part of their attempted to do just this. They were trying to sell the consumer data they had collected over the years… until Apple stepped in and told them no you won’t, you can’t sell data collected in conjunction with an IPhone.
The hype and consumer demand for these products has created a frenzy for the wearable manufacturers. They are rushing to grab their piece of the pie and get their product on the market and in the hands of consumers before their competitor does.
When this happens, security goes out the window. It is unfortunate and very shortsighted for a company to approach a product this way because when a something happens, dealing with a breach and fixing errors is much more difficult after the fact.
So why should you care?
The reason for the concern is because your personal data is extremely valuable! Credit card companies are very good at being able to detect fraud and cancel everything done during a breach. So the life of a credit card number on the black market can be very short.
However, you can’t change your social security number or your birth date, that information is worth 10- 20 times more on the black market than your credit card. It’s the reason you are seeing a rise in breaches at healthcare organizations.
Even in technology, having the 1st of every product is not always better.
So until there are standards in security and some sort of guarantee from these companies that they won’t sell or share our data, it’s up to us to protect our privacy. Weigh the pros and cons and the value to you before you purchase your new health or fitness tracker. And this is one purchase you definitely don’t want to go cheap on. Stick with the top name brand.