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Over the past decade, fitness trackers have become an important part of our daily lives. In 2021, global shipments of watches, wristbands and other wearables will surpass his 530 million units. By collecting and analyzing information ranging from location to sleep duration, calorie intake to mood changes, these devices track our progress and provide personalized recommendations through dedicated apps. To do.
There’s a lot more to the social and emotional aspects of it. Or just think how rewarding it is to share your latest Strava tracked run on social.
But as Web2 has taught us, when personal data is involved, it costs nothing. With 24/7 monitoring, trackers know everything about you, from where you live to the exact time you hit your pillow. How secure is the data you share with fitness apps, and how can modern technologies like blockchain help you control the exposure of your data?
Fitness Tracker: Record it
Wearables literally record our every move, raising privacy concerns as well. These include the 2018 Pumpup leak, which exposed personal health data, credit card information, and private messages between users, and the 2020 Kinomap leak, which exposed 42 million user records to hacker attacks. Accelerated by massive hacks and leaks. Last year, databases containing more than 61 million records related to wearable technology and fitness services such as FitBit and Apple’s HealthKit, including usernames, dates of birth, weight, and GPS logs of personal trips, went unprotected online. It also happened when
Sharing personal data with health apps has some vulnerabilities. One is that users are largely unaware of how their personal data (name, address, age, gender, etc.) is used. After all, how often do you revise your terms and conditions before you hit “accept” so that developers are free to do whatever they want with regards to data handling, including selling to marketing her specialists? can.
Still, even the high integrity of app creators does not guarantee the security of your data.With a closed-source app, you have no way of knowing how vulnerable your code is to exploits and attacks. If even Apple’s fitness record is in jeopardy, what can we expect from independent developers?
The risks of data being sold to marketers or being compromised and lost in hacks vary. At most, you’ll get used to fine-tuning your targeted ads. Worst case — social engineering hacks and theft. It goes without saying that we all deserve our right to privacy.
As demand rises for an ethical approach and new standards for data storage, blockchain solutions will reinvent fitness as fitness finance and bring transparency.
Blockchain, FitFi, Ethical Data Collection
FitFi is a new industry born at the intersection of the fitness and blockchain worlds. One of FitFi’s goals is to transfer the principles of ethical data collection to fitness.
First, it should be transparent to the end user about what data you’re sharing with your app and how it’s used, and they should be able to revoke permissions at any time. Second, change the way data is stored, such as data encoding, and consider more advanced storage solutions than large centralized databases to reduce the potential for large leaks. And third, it enforces new auditing standards that require applications to undergo thorough code checks to avoid vulnerabilities.
So how does blockchain become a remedy for privacy breaches? Databases cannot be changed or modified, allowing for a high degree of transparency and accountability. By choosing a blockchain-based solution, you can take back ownership of your data by tracking who has accessed it and changing permissions at any time to prevent misuse of your personal information.
Another benefit that blockchain brings is the ability to encode database records using cryptography. In this scenario, sensitive data remains safe even in the event of a breach. And finally, new decentralized storage solutions offer an opportunity to move away from centralized cloud storage.
And finally, the code audit culture is still developing in this area. Still, as the average user becomes more knowledgeable, more projects will follow the mandate for high-level data security and thoroughly check code before launching an app.
The quest for better perception
As you read this, you may have your smartwatch on or you may have a health app running in the background on your phone that is geolocating and recording your steps. The amount of personal data collected and stored by apps is growing exponentially. It’s time to claim that we have more control over FitFi by exploring the benefits it brings to our health and privacy.
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