The development of wearable sports devices creates a lot of controversies. They are helpful instruments for people who regularly do sports; however, they also impose privacy and confidentiality risks on their users. One wearable device is an electronic self-tracker – a device or application that helps users monitor fitness-related measures. Electronic self-trackers, also known as fitness trackers, have many advantages like keeping track of progress and setting goals; it motivates and keeps users responsible for their activity. Nonetheless, such fitness devices and applications have several disadvantages too. For instance, users are concerned about the safety of their data. Privacy, confidentiality, and security measures are essential in the Internet age; therefore, electronic self-trackers impose some ethical issues. Self-trackers had a tremendous effect on society, business, and medical billing and coding careers because they changed the way users’ personal information about health is kept.
Privacy, confidentiality, and security are interconnected concepts that serve as a fundamental human rights for the safety of data in cyberspace. Electronic self-trackers connected to the Internet might cause danger for their users if third parties steal data from the device. In such cases, data privacy and confidentiality are violated. There is also a risk that data will be spread further, which breaks data security. Users perform 24/7 activity with electronic devices, which creates masses of data stored in the device or application itself. Leakage of any private data related to fitness (such as sleeping time and quality) or access to geolocation might be problematic for the user, primarily if the fitness device is used in conjunction with a smartphone (Aktypi & Goldsmith, 2017). According to the study by Aktypi & Goldsmith (2017), “The neglected security aspect on the design of those connected devices facilitates the processing and collection of personal information, elevating the risk of exposing users’ identity data without their consent.” (p. 3) Identity data also includes data about a person’s location and home or work addresses, which do not adhere to security rules. Exposure of personal identity is an infringement of privacy and confidentiality because it reveals information not supposed to be seen or used by third parties.
Apart from identity exposure, children possessing fitness devices might be in a more significant danger because they are a feebler part of society. Likewise, disabled people who use fitness trackers to monitor metrics related to their health like heart rate or blood pressure will not benefit from the leakage of their personal information. To eliminate such risks for vulnerable individuals in the community, businesses that produce electronic self-tracking devices should reconsider the current design of fitness tools and develop more accurate and safe gadgets. As & Goldsmith argues in their study (2017), a few people are aware of the consequences of using electronic self-trackers and passing them confidential data. Thus, it should be the concern of corporations to produce secure devices.
Medical billing and coding are a career that can contribute to researching the topic of electronic devices and applications used in healthcare. Fitness trackers might also become a critical research topic for the field. One of the possible ways to further use fitness gadgets in medical billing and coding is to work as a medical records technician. This job needs the usage of trackers to create reports and later use them in coding for insurance claims. However, the job also requires accurate and safe fitness devices for patients, which is the responsibility of gadget producers.
To conclude, it has been debated that privacy, confidentiality, and security are essential matters that should be considered when designing electronic self-tracking gadgets. Fitness gadgets might leak the users’ private and confidential data, which can later harm a person. It is crucial to provide data security from self-trackers to users like children, the old, and the disabled. It is suggested that privacy, confidentiality, and security should be mainly considered by producing companies. In addition, workers and students in the medical billing and coding field can serve as researchers on this topic and bridge companies, users, and healthcare workers.
Reference
Aktypi, A. J. R.C. Nurse, & Goldsmith, M. (2017). Unwinding Ariadne’s identity thread: Privacy risks with fitness trackers and online social networks.Proceedings of the 2017 on Multimedia Privacy and Security (MPS ’17). 1–11.