Privacy concerns regarding wearable IoT devices: How it is influenced by GDPR?

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have implications for health and fitness. Fitness wearables can promote healthy behavior and improve an individual's overall health and quality of life. Even though fitness wearables have various benefits, privacy concerns regarding the data collected remain as a major barrier to adoption of fitness wearables. Intrinsic factors like disposition to value privacy and extrinsic factors like privacy policies and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can influence users' privacy concerns. This research uses experimental design to understand how these factors influence privacy concerns. The results suggest that GDPR reduces the average privacy concerns of users. The study also shows that higher perception of effectiveness of privacy policy reduces the perception of privacy risks and increases the perception of privacy control. This study illustrates the effect of users' perceptions on factors like privacy policy, privacy control and GDPR on mitigating privacy concerns.