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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.
vendors will have little choice but to hand it over.
One of the strongest arguments I have for why I want programs to work with local content.
HEY, your ad-driven phone app sends all it's data back to a central repository detailing almost every facet of my life. That's great, but I think I'll pass.
What's that? 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?
Perhaps I'm just being paranoid here. There certainly doesn't look like there's rampant wide-spread abuse of this sort of data. Yet. But it's still the sort of thing that rubs me the wrong way.
The next time wrist band activity will be used as an evidence that someone does not go out and I lives only a passive live, that someone can buy a cat.
Use that wristband as cat's collar. In fact cat and sedentary people are almost indistinguishable, from computer's point of view.
So, what is next? Surveillance cameras corroborating that the disabled owner is truly sitting home. 365/24/7 surveillance and records prior to the potential insurance accident just to prove that in the past the owner was active and outdoorsy person?
My wrist is not Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
I agree that a difference of scale exists. But it's still a noticeable loss if you get mugged and someone steals your smartwatch, smartphone, wallet, and other valuables, and you can't use your telemetry data against the mugger because the mugger stole the devices on which they were recorded.