Abstract
Keeping an active lifestyle has been important and recommended for decades. The arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) offers opportunities to simplify the tracking and logging of data supporting that lifestyle. So-called activity or fitness trackers have become smaller and more affordable over the past few years. However, their use is not as widespread as could be. This explorative study with n = 82 participants investigates privacy concerns and sensitivity regarding data gathered with wearables. It was found that long-term storage location and possible recipients of the collected data do play important roles. However, the consensus was that the participants would prefer to keep said data to themselves. Furthermore, user factors such as age, gender, and privacy behavior could not be identified as having an effect on sharing said data.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all participants of the focus group and the survey for their willingness to share their thoughts and feelings about persuasive technologies, fitness trackers, and their privacy concerns. We also thank Thomas Achterfeldt for his research support. Parts of this work have been funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under project MyneData (KIS1DSD045).
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Lidynia, C., Brauner, P., Ziefle, M. (2018). A Step in the Right Direction – Understanding Privacy Concerns and Perceived Sensitivity of Fitness Trackers. In: Ahram, T., Falcão, C. (eds) Advances in Human Factors in Wearable Technologies and Game Design. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 608. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60639-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60639-2_5
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