Villages thrive on gossip and the one I live in is far from being an exception. So when a local shop owner was seen wearing an ankle monitor a couple of years ago, the rumor-mill went into overtime. What had she done to end up wearing such a device? The answer was incredibly mundane: absolutely nothing, except decide to wear a rather chunky activity tracker on her ankle rather than her wrist. No crime was involved, just the punishment of tracking her steps to get a little healthier, or fitter, or both.
But the similarities of a court-imposed ankle monitor and a fitness tracker (or smartwatch) are intriguing and becoming more interlaced. Sure, one is designed to stop you wandering too far from your designated area, while the other is supposed to encourage you to step further afield to shed some pounds, but both send the information back to some faceless organization that may add the fitness and health data to the ever-growing data stack on who, what, where – and perhaps even why – we are who we are.
It's not just the wearable gadget itself that is a source of this information. Rather, it is the fitness app that the wearer is using that can often be the leakiest tattletale. Take Strava, for example, which appears to be rather popular among the military. In late 2017 Strava released a heat map that showed every activity ever uploaded – more than 3 trillion individual GPS points. The problem is that this highlighted military personnel use in places such as Afghanistan, Syria and more, especially since the local population was far less likely to be wearing smart devices to track their calorie burn. Military bases lit up like a beacon on Strava’s map.
Old news, perhaps, but earlier this year a similar data set was used to track the positions and patrol schedules of France’s nuclear submarines based on the fitness activity of crew members when they were at Ile Longue naval base. The map and related activity showed when the submarine crews were on base, and the period of inactivity suggested the precise timing of when the submarine was on patrol. Oh, and apparently President Biden’s security team also had a penchant for these apps, if you know what I mean.
Security lapses aside, this data is a goldmine for companies looking to sell us products as our steps, locations, heart rate and more is tracked. Perhaps even more intriguing to some companies is our goals and aspirations that we set in the app: why did we strap this device on, what have we set as our daily calorie burn and step goal and are we succeeding? Should we, perhaps, be sold diet snacks, extra protein, workout clothing, therapy sessions and more? The opportunity list is seemingly endless once the advertisers have access to our health and wellness data. And every additional data nugget means more targeted advertising as companies look to squeeze more dollars from our tightening wallets.
Do most of us care? Probably not. We give away so much information about ourselves anyway through our browser history, smartphone use and online shopping activity (not to mention reward card memberships and many, many more data sources). We should though, if the information being used is heading into the category of personal health and fitness data.
The younger generation is savvier and proving to be far more aware of the negatives that lurk within these shiny toys. And it’s not just about how their data may be shared with third parties when it comes to smartwatches and trackers. We are seeing the leading edge of a trend where some children are no longer so excited when their parents give them a shiny new smartwatch, viewing it as a deal with the devil: a cool device that shares far too much about them … with their parents as well as third-parties. And top of the list is the ability of the parent to track their location, which brings us back to the ankle monitor analogy.
It's not all doom and gloom for the younger generation though; nor for the manufacturers of the actual smartwatches and trackers. It’s an opportunity for the manufacturers to emphasize the privacy benefits of their own apps, rather than using third party apps: one of those “what happens on the smartwatch stays on the smartwatch” kind of campaigns perhaps, with the caveat of “only if you just use our app for your tracking, of course”. Keeping more smartwatch wearers within the confines of the ecosystem leads to more loyal customers as a switch in smartwatch brand will mean the consumer probably loses their historical tracking data.
It’s also an educational moment for parents with their children as the smartwatch is far from being the only device that can be used to track them. The ubiquitous smartphone offers just as much opportunity for parental tracking (not to mention commercial data-gathering) and it is unlikely many children will step away from that device. Parenting is always a balance between boundaries and freedom, just as an ankle monitor limits boundaries, while a tracker encourages more freedom. Or perhaps my local shopkeeper started a trend, and we will see more people strapping the wearable to their ankles as a silent protest over the capabilities of the device their parents “forced” them to wear.