Civil Case Uses Fitbit Data To Disprove Insurance Fraud

Lucas123 writes In what could presage an era of data from wearables being used in civil and criminal litigation cases, a Canadian attorney is using data collected by a Fitbit activity tracking wrist band to prove his client is not scamming an insurance company. The defendant's attorney normalized the data using an analytics platform that compares activity data with other wearables, offering a way to benchmark his client's health against a larger group of wearable owners. Legal and privacy experts say it's only a matter of time before wearable data will be used in criminal cases, as well, and the vendors will have little choice but to hand it over. "I do think that's coming down the pike. It's just a matter of time," said Neda Shakoori, an eDiscovery expert with the law firm of McManis Faulkner. Health privacy laws, such as HIPAA, don't cover wearables and those companies can be subpoenaed — just as Google and Microsoft have been for years.

Comments

Memory limit and data durability

[tepples]

People want this data on other devices? Why do you think that means it has to go live out on a server somewhere? Have you never heard of sync?

I think the idea is that you still want to collect telemetry even if you're collecting more data than will fit in the device's memory. Or you still want your data to survive even if the device on which it was collected does not (see Malaysia Airlines Flight 370).

Re: Privacy means local storage

[tysonedwards]

Local storage on a phone - devices that are small, visible, portable and valuable have a considerable market and as such lead to thefts - is a single point of failure where you can lose everything. Further, the industry average is to replace these devices every 18 months. There are mitigating strategies such as backup and resync approaches, but these create additional steps and introduce the likelihood of users losing their data. Hence why the idea of server side storage exists, as a means of making these device replacements easier and more transparent to users.

Does that come with potential privacy issues? Of course it does, but largely the market decided that they would rather the convenience of a "dumb terminal" that can be replaced and immediately behave just like their old one than the security of a fully local model. Until there are massive security breaches that hit *most* people, where these approaches to cloud data storage is shown directly at fault (and not those visible to most, but largely affecting celebrities only as was the case with Fappening or other similar events) then this type of thinking will continue and new services introduced that are more and more Internet-centric for tasks that ultimately don't need to be.