Your fitness tracker knows too much about you.
Where you jog, where you work, and, yes, where you sleep — all this and more is collected, aggregated, and analyzed by the companies behind the exercise apps on your smartphone and the devices you strap to your body. And that's a problem.
Just how bigof a problem was brought into stark relief Monday, when a Twitter user pointed out that the Strava global heatmap — an online, interactive map of activity by people who use the Strava mobile app or have a Fitbit or Jawbone — inadvertently revealed the location of military bases overseas. To make matters worse, Wiredreported it's also possible to take data publicly available via Strava's API and see the names of individuals tied to specific running routes.
SEE ALSO:When it comes to online security, being paranoid is no longer enoughThis is obviously a concern for the armed services --in fact, today the U.S. military announced it would revise its rules on the use of wearable devices. But what about for you? Assuming you're not deployed, and instead use your Fitbit to count the steps to and from your desk, do you really have anything to worry about?
The answer is most definitely yes.
Let's zoom in.Credit: stravaThe privacy red flags fall into two categories: the known and the speculative. The former are obvious, and present some troubling problems immediately. If your power-walking route is broadcast online without your knowledge, and is able to be tied to your real-world identity, it opens you up to a real-world version of the harassment many people are forced to confront online.
Suddenly, your attempt to simply lose a few pounds means stalkers or trolls can determine both your running routine and the location of your home. It also means a jilted ex who happened to remember your favorite cycling spots could track down your new home address.
This is recipe for disaster.
"We kill people based on metadata."
But it's the aforementioned speculative concerns that present the larger question of what it means to live in a data-rich society, and how the act of thoughtlessly contributing granular location data to for-profit corporations might one day be turned against you.
What machine learning and AI will someday be able to glean about us using only information similar to that contained within the heatmap is unknown, but associate professor at UNC's School of Information and Library Science Zeynep Tufekci — the self-styled "technosociologist" who called out the potential dangers posed by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter before pretty much anyone else — thinks we should be very, very careful.
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And Tufekci's not the only one. Adam Harvey, perhaps best known for creating CV Dazzle and Hyperface, pointed out that the digital traces we leave online via fitness tracking apps like Strava give others power over us.
Tweet may have been deleted
After all, as former Director of the National Security Agency Michael Hayden reminded us in 2014, "We kill people based on metadata."
While the U.S. government is likely not about to drone you (although, who knows), there exist other threats to your privacy — both present and future — that are only exacerbated by apps like Strava and devices like Fitbit. And sure, you can denote your runs as "private" on the aforementioned app, but even having done that, your data is still being uploaded to Strava's servers — it's just not actively shared with every creep who decides to poke around publicly available datasets like the heatmap.
Of course, you don't have to participate. For starters, try deleting the Strava app from your smartphone or tossing that Fitbit in your drawer and leaving it there. Your fitness tracker won't know too much about you when it's in a landfill.
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