The Apple Watch, the much-awaited tech toy of the Apple faithful, stands as another crowning achievement of the wearable technology craze. With all its many features, it seems like the perfect way to reach out, tap your friends and stay in touch with colleagues on the move. The wide array of apps designed to work with the Apple Watch also makes it a useful machine to augment a user’s daily routine. From scheduling appointments to keeping track of your daily amount of exercise, the Apple Watch manages a massive amount of data exchange. It is enough to cause many consumers to question just where all this data about you ends up being leaked.
Is Your Tech Betraying You
Since many users of the Apple Watch have geared up to let their devices tell them when to engage in exercise, apps that gather data on the amount of activity you do and any vital signs the Apple Watch can detect are sources of important information to professional hackers. At first glance, you may be wondering what on earth a hacker would want with your personal biological data. The truth is that your personal biological data is, in all honesty, a true picture of your overall health in real time. As for who wants this information, the number of businesses who profit from knowing specifics about your health issues are potentially endless. Due to HIPAA restrictions, companies are unable to obtain this information directly from your doctor; however, gathering personal biological data from an app you choose to download is a far less restricted source for information gathering. In short, it is a situation where you may want to be extremely careful as to the type of information you allow to be gathered about your picture of health.
Who Is Interested in Your Personal Biological Data
If you would really like to know who is interested in your personal biological data, just ask any life insurance company attempting to run a risk analysis on you prior to rendering a decision about granting you a policy. If a team of professional app developers or hackers of mobile and wearable tech are able to gather your personal biological information to leak back to a life insurance firm, this could potentially affect various factors about how likely you will be accepted for life insurance. Many of these companies look for various markers, such as high cholesterol, liver function, high blood sugar and so on to determine how much of a risk you happen to be to their bottom line. The more accurate of a real time picture they can get on you, with or without your knowing, the better they can mitigate against any monetary losses. In addition, companies that sell health-related products would also love to know if you are within the scope of their marketing niche to improve their targeted marketing campaigns. It always makes good sense to market health-related products to the people who are most likely to need or use these products.
The Pervasive Tech Landscape
As technology is being increasingly used to gather mountains of data about individuals, the analysis of Big Data has become integral in making sense of all this personal and biological data. Not only is the tech industry seeking to analyze Big Data, but this trend is reaching towards real time analysis to predict hot trends that are occurring in the moment. Consequently, at the pace at which the technology is growing, the demand for real time analytics is growing right along with it. Unfortunately for consumers, real time analytics are only possible and accurate enough to matter, if your devices are constantly gathering data about you for companies interested in mining that data for market advantages. In light of this development, it almost behooves companies to either design apps or hire hackers to obtain this data for them to be able to keep up with the competition.
This is another reason why the tech industry is still growing. If you’re looking for a career to get into this would be the one to look at. Now days it is easier than ever to get involved through classes from companies such as PluralSight. Companies now are no longer able to rely completely on physical security systems such as Pro-Vigil to protect them, thanks to the digital age they need to hire an increasing number of people who are familiar with technology. The Apple watch is just another example of this.
About the Author:
Lee Ying has over 10 years experience in the tech and security industry. He currently writes for various websites, if you would like to contact him you can find him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/lee-ying/9a/18b/238. Follow me on Twitter @LeeYing101
