Page 55 - Cyber Warnings

In a more heart warming story, a couple got an anomalous diagnosis from the wife’s Fitbit. The
husband noticed that his wife’s resting heart rate was higher than it should be. He was
concerned that she might have tachycardia or arrhythmia.

He discovered that she experiencing a physical condition, however, she was beating for two.
Yes, the Fitbit revealed that his wife was pregnant before any test or doctor. Surprise!

It doesn’t appear at this point like there is an overly sensitive situation here, however, wearers of
these devices are creating a trackable footprint about their activities, and their bodies. This
footprint is could easily be used to profile a person.

It seems silly to think that a hacker might be interested in when your heart rate was spiking, but
when this data is stored and then predictive analytics are applied, a person becomes intimately
profiled.

This profile, when coupled with predictive analytics can not only display what you do, but what
you will probably do.

Is this a precursor to ‘future crime’? Predicting all of the implications of new technology is
always fraught with folly.

People are typically wrong and tend to skew towards the paranoid. It feels like a giant leap to
think that wearable fitness trackers will lead to privacy invasions, but we must be vigilant about
these enormous amounts of data that we are creating.

This new data source does demand that we begin to take a closer look at how we value privacy
in this new world of live, streaming personal information.

About the Author

Jerry Mooney lives in Idaho where he is a professor of Language and
Communications. He is the author of the novel History Yoghurt and the Moon
and the creator of The Lighten Up Project and Zenruption. He has traveled to
17 countries, including Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

55 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – February 2016 Edition
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