Tag: wearable tech

A new report has indicated that certain wearables and the apps needed to use them are posing a privacy risk.

Citizen Lab, in partnership with Open Effect have now released a report that has suggested that the mobile security being provided by several popular fitness trackers are actually vulnerable to potential tampering, surveillance and tracking over the long term.

These devices are quite commonplace and are used to allow a person to monitor his or her physical activity.

The report was the result of an examination of eight different fitness trackers and the mobile apps that are needed to use them. It was conducted by Citizen Lab from the University of Toronto, and the Open Effect not-for-profit research group. They looked into these applications and wearables to determine the level of mobile security and privacy they were able to provide. The trackers the researchers examined included: the Fitbit Charge HR, Jawbone Up 2, Garmin Vivosmart, Basis Peak, Mio Fuse, Xiaomi Mi Band, Withings Pulse O2 and even the Apple Watch.

The researchers looked at a range of different mobile security measures for every device they considered.

The factors included those pertaining to the collection and storage of data, as well as their transmission practices. What they determined was that every device, aside from the Apple Watch, persistently emitted uniqueIDs by way of their embedded Bluetooth radios. Those identifications could potentially expose the users of the wearables to location tracking over the long-term, even at times in which the device was not paired to a smartphone or tablet.

The report said the Apple Watch was the only one among the wearables that actually randomized its Bluetooth ID, causing it to be impossible to track that smartwatch over the long-term.

The authors of the report also pointed out that the Jawbone and Withings app was vulnerable to being exploited in order to crate fraudulent fitness records. The reason this poses a mobile security risk due to the chance that the data collected by personal fitness wearables could be used in court cases, health insurance programs and for other official reasons. Therefore, if that data has been falsified, it could create a highly undesirable risk for the users.

Whether you’re headed to Mardi Gras or another festival or attraction, wearables can help find children in a crowd.

Although wearable technology has been primarily focused on issues such as health and fitness tracking as well as call and text alerts, it is now being speculated that these devices might also become very popular among parents who want to make sure their kids can find their way back again if they should wander off in a crowd.

This is good news for parents who will be bringing little ones to the Mardi Gras celebrations, this year.

That said, wearable technology’s benefit for helping scared and lost children to find their parents, once again, is hardly limited to the Carnival season. As events start to become more common over the spring and summer, the need to keep track of kids and to give them a way to be safely returned to parents will only become more important. In this way, parents will not only be able to keep track of event locations, concert schedules, parade routes, and festival maps, but they’ll also bring young ones back to parents again.

This use for wearable technology will be important for helping families to keep calm and to stick together.

While many events – including Mardi Gras – are designed to be exceptionally family friendly, when such a large number of people are all milling about in the same location, it takes only a split second before family members can become separated from each other. Moreover, it takes only a few feet of distance before another person can become impossible to see from among all the rest of the people in the crowd, particularly with so many other distracting, colorful and exciting things going on all around. Parents are now using wearables to make it possible for little ones to send an alert to the smartphones of their parents when they’re lost or scared, without having to find a phone of their own.

This is being accomplished through gadgets such as the GizmoPal 2, which is made by LG and that runs on the Verizon network. It employs GPS and wearable technology that will allow children press a button to access two-way communication with their parents.