Nike+ FuelBand: Possibly a Big Security Hole For Your Life

MojoKid writes "Nike+ FuelBand is a $149 wristband with LED display that tracks your daily activity, tells you how many calories you've burned, lets you know how much fuel you have left in the tank, and basically keeps track of 'every move you make.' If you think that sounds like a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, it pretty much is. A source directly connected to Nike reported an amusing, albeit startling anecdote about a guy who got caught cheating on his girlfriend because of the Nike+ FuelBand. 'They shared their activity between each other and she noticed he was active at 1-2AM, when he was supposed to be home.' That's just one scenario. What if the wristband gets lost or stolen? How much data is actually stored on these sorts of devices? And remember, you're syncing it to the cloud with an iOS or Android app."

Comments

Re:That's more tracking than intensive probation

[jhoegl]

Clearly, the guy who was wearing the band forgot to take it off when he was into his laborous other activities.
This shows the ignorance people have of technology more than anything else.
This is how you subjugate a populace... make sure they are ignorant, make sure they get a benefit out of something, and then hide the real reason.
I mean, it worked for that one guy with the ring in that documentary I saw.

Re:what is the point of this article?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Yes. It keeps track of what you're doing. You know this because you can see the data it captures.

Yes, you can see the data that it captures. What you can't see is all of the things which that data may reveal about you in the hands of someone motivated enough. Don't confuse the forest with the trees - the anecdote about the guy getting caught cheating is not about the risk of getting caught cheating, it is the risk of "20/20 hindsight." In retrospect it is obvious that his data would reveal something like that to a suspicios girlfriend. But at the time it was not so obvious, it isn't like he deliberately uploaded a message that said "having sex with another girl @1am" to the nike website.

Pervasive data collection is extremely new, we as a society have not figured out all of the risks involved. Contrast that to "living in a small town" - because society has had millenia of experience with that situation we generally have a good understanding of the risks involved. It is going to take a lot of people finding out the hard way what the problems are with pervasive data collection before we, if we ever, come to understand the trade-offs that come along with it.