Buddy's Wearable Is Not Your Buddy: Privacy Implications of Pet Wearables

Pets without PETs: on pet owners’ under-estimation of privacy concerns in pet wearables

“…[com/ca/co.uk], using the Amazon 'Pet Tracker' category and a list of devices from a comparison of pet wearables' privacy policies [68]. Excluding devices with < 20 reviews at the time of writing, we then matched the results with similar human wearables.…”

“…A review of the privacy policies of commercially available pet wearables [68] has shown there is a critical mismatch between how these devices are marketed and their transparency in what data they captured. Six devices with activity tracking functionality did not detail any pet activity data in their privacy policies, while seven devices with location tracking functionality did not detail any location data in their privacy policy.…”

“…The spread of what little evidence is available suggests no relationship between technical security and public opinion. Of these devices, previous analyses of privacy policies by [68] showed that the Whistle and FitBark were less likely to have mismatches between their stated policy and actual device capability, whereas amongst the negatively reviewed devices also covered, the policies of the Link AKC, TabCat, TractiveGPS and TractiveMotion all had missing information about data the devices were collecting. This is suggestive of a potential relationship between the clarity or completeness of privacy policies and user opinion, although the small number of devices covered here does not allow for strong claims.…”

“…If the above section has made a point that people do not seem to care about their privacy, this section will show that they certainly do not care about the privacy of bystanders. Bystander privacy is known to be impacted by pet wearables [68]. Human wearables are no different in this regard, and may indeed go further in how grievous the infringement of bystanders' privacy is depending on the sensors contained in a device and the data collection they enable -microphones recording all ambient audio, video recording what people do in public, and so on [17,31].…”

“…It is already the case that consumers are often left unaware of data collected by apps running on their own phones [6] -consider what privacy implications are going unexamined when those apps are purportedly monitoring pets, rather than the consumers themselves. This represents a particularly important case to study, because while pet wearables may on a first glance seem to be 'for' pets, they capture more owner data than expected [68], impacting their privacy, even though they may remain unaware of this.…”