Users’ Responses to Privacy Issues with the Connected Information Ecologies Created by Fitness Trackers

Abstract

With increased innovation and adoption of digital technologies in our everyday life for various purposes, media, privacy experts, advocates, scholars and researchers have noted and raised privacy and security concerns associated with the misuse of personal information from digital technologies. These technologies enable collection, processing and re-puposing of personal information for various purposes by commercial and interested entities.This paper presents a privacy awareness perspective in an attempt to understand how people respond to privacy concerns while using activity tracking devices and applications, loyalty cards and related data sharing within various information ecologies. The research used a constructivist paradigm; we interviewed twenty-one users of activity trackers and loyalty cards to understand their privacy practices. Results show that privacy is a flexible concept which is a result of users' negotiation between the benefits and the harms of disclosing personal information.

Fitness Tracking Technologies: Data Privacy Doesn’t Matter? The (Un)Concerns of Users, Former Users, and Non-Users

“…Five of the seven items were adopted from Lidynia, Schomakers, and Ziefle [19], who among others investigated the data privacy concerns of fitness tracking users and non-users in Germany. The other two items were added based on the research about involvement of heath insurances and possible third parties inferences [14,17,26]. All three types of participants (users, former users, and non-users of activity tracking applications) had to answer those questions.…”

Data privacy-related behavior and concerns of activity tracking technology users from Germany and the USA

“…In a study by Pingo and Narayan (2018), participants complained that the privacy and data policies are regularly too long and that they have no real choice not to accept it if they would like to use the activity tracking technologies. An in-depth look into one of the popular activity and fitness tracking applications suggests a positive change toward giving the consumers more control over their data, possibly initiated by the GDPR.…”

“…The option to request the deletion of data is one of several possibilities for users wanting to handle their data more responsibly. Nevertheless, Pingo and Narayan (2018) mention that data privacy protection is not concluded by simply offering privacy settings. "The privacy settings feature requires effort and some form of privacy literacy to understand how they function, in order to meaningfully use them to safeguard the informational privacy of oneself Activity tracking technology users and privacy and others" (Pingo and Narayan, 2018, p. 250).…”

“…From an information science perspective, Case and Given (2016) explain that the perceived feeling of information overload leads to an information avoidance behavior, which helps to deal with those circumstances. Too much information and long privacy policies lead to a situation where people either do not read them completely or do not read them at all, even though they decide to use an application (Pingo and Narayan, 2018). Considering that the consumers rarely read privacy policies, the question arises whether activity and fitness tracking users seek any information about what happens with their personal and health data and, if so, which sources they prefer.…”

“…Users in the USA are somewhat more convinced about this than users in Germany (Ilhan and Henkel, 2018). Pingo and Narayan (2018) showed that sharing information collected by fitness trackers with health insurance funds is perceived as beneficial (e.g. reducing costs) and uncomfortable (e.g.…”