Your Exercise Gear Reserves The Right To Track And Sell Data On How You Smell
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept
A new Consumer Reports study unsurprisingly finds that popular exercise equipment makers collect way more data on users than is necessary, then sell access to that data to a wide variety of dodgy and largely unregulated data brokers and middle men, who in turn generally play fast and loose with it.
Consumer Reports studied ten different exercise equipment manufacturers (including Peloton, Tonal, NordicTrack, and BowFlex) and found they collect just a massive array of sensitive data, from your personal details and health metrics to your location data (assuming the gear is mobile). Not only that, their overlong privacy policies reserve the right to things they don’t do yet, like track how you smell:
“Whether this really happens, or ever will in the future, is not clear. The company did not respond to requests for comment. But while your exercise service claiming the right to collect data on your smell may seem more strange than worrying, it hints at how many companies approach data collection.”
The U.S. has generally been too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era. Or regulate a vast array of super dodgy data brokers that are repeatedly caught selling access to sensitive consumer data to criminals, stalkers, foreign and domestic governments, disinformation peddlers, and anybody with a few nickels to spare.
These companies all track data on fertility status, which is kind of a problem in an era where surveillance-happy authoritarians are criminalizing female reproductive health care:
“The smart home gym company Tonal, for example, says it may collect data about your pregnancy status, while Peloton offers workouts specifically for pregnancy, and collects information about any workouts you participate in. (Surveillance of pregnant people has become a concern for many Americans in the wake of state and proposed national measures to restrict abortion access.)”
In addition to your health, location, behavior, payment, and other data, these products all glean additional data from the devices and services you connect them to. And again, there’s very little in the way of any sort of comprehensive law governing how this data is collected, stored, and monetized, making this particularly problematic in a greedy country now run by dim authoritarians.
When companies are pressed for comment, they state they “fully adhere to all applicable data privacy regulations,” which is meaningless because there usually aren’t any (though some state laws do allow you to request who your data is being shared with). Or they’ll insist this scale of data collection isn’t a big deal because the data has been “anonymized,” a term we’ve long noted is absolutely meaningless.
Again, this fast and loose approach to privacy and security is absolutely begging for the kind of privacy scandal that makes all of the scandals we’ve seen so far seem adorable by comparison. It’s simply a matter of time.
Filed Under: consumers, data brokers, fitness, privacy, security, surveillance, workout
Companies: bowflex, consumer reports, nordictrack, peloton, tonal
Comments on “Your Exercise Gear Reserves The Right To Track And Sell Data On How You Smell”
So far, my running shoes, fitness frame, freeweights and manual bicycle are free from all this.
Any time I see a personal fitness/maintenance item that “connects to the cloud” I just nope out of it. Unlike televisions, there’s still lots of quality equipment around that serves just the original intended purpose. I leave connectivity/tracking/sensing to my phone and watch, where I can control what gets collected and distributed.
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To my view, you’ve got one redundant item there.
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My watch can check my heartrate, VO2, etc, but can’t talk to anything but my phone about it. My phone intentionally doesn’t collect data, it just manipulates and stores it.
Sure, I could go for a connected watch, but I don’t trust those to always have my best interests at heart.
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Electronic running shoes were originally a joke from Back to the Future 2, that some shoe companies apparently didn’t realize was a joke. (Several models now exist.)
I was thinking, though, that electronic bicycle components could actually be decent if done correctly. Well, I was thinking of it when a story about competitors hacking each others’ shifters came out, so of course nothing was done correctly; the manufacturer went with insecure radio control (and batteries for power, so that’s something extra to monitor and deal with). But had they been connected via wired CANbus, with an open protocol, and powered by wheel motion, they might actually be nice: one could get pretty close to 100%-accurate shifting, without having to replace and tension steel cables.
It’s always the same “people do nothing with their data, so better sell them to offer cheaper/better products”.
Most do expect that all their devices are connected to be able to know exactly how much exercises they’ve done or calories they’ve burnt (even if theses numbers are totally meaningless).
And since most users don’t know/care about it, it’s seem fine for everybody (at long as theses devices work as intended, at least for few years then they all need to be replaced) that spend a hundreds bucks on “smart” devices that let you do all the work.
Some are even lost without all their devices beeping on every step.
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Full Self-Walking?
“Your Exercise Gear Reserves The Right To Track And Sell Data On How You Smell” is definitely not a sentence that I anticipated seeing today.
Every “smart” device is a surveillance device. No exceptions, no excuses.
Time for some malicious compliance
I’d buy one that detects odors…. and permanently park it behind the shitter. Let them make what they will of that data. 😉
Data of how I smell?
Well, garbage in, garbage out.
My exercise equipment? I don’t think so. Bought in the mid-2010s and strictly analog, baby.