Privacy Protecting Fitness Trackers: An Oxymoron or Soon to Be Reality?

Abstract

The rapid technological advancements are supposed to simplify our everyday life. They are also increasingly utilized to support an active lifestyle with diverse tracking devices, like fitness trackers or smart watches. However, they do not seem to make the life of legislators and data privacy advocates easier. In contrary, with better and faster technology our (health-related) private data faces more and more threats. To better understand the current status of the intersecting domains of devices like fitness trackers and the data privacy, we have analyzed the development of general data privacy regulations in the EU as well as the data transfer modalities between EU and USA. Afterwards, we reviewed scientific publications on fitness trackers (or smart watches) and data privacy, in order to identify, whether there is interest in this topic among scholars and if so, which aspects do they investigate in particular.