Recently, an Australian student publicized that Strava, a fitness app, had published online a Global Heat Map that “uses satellite information to map the locations and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year period, by illuminating areas of activity,” according to the Washington Post. Strava “allows millions of users to time and map their workouts and to post them online for friends to see, and it can track their movements at other times,” the New York Times reports.

The data, culled from Strava’s 27 million users (who own Fitbits and other wearable fitness devices), is not updated in real-time. Yet the map still raised privacy and security questions for Strava’s users.

A similar case in 2011 concerning wearable device Fitbit also raised privacy questions about searchable fitness data. There was an uproar over Fitbit’s privacy settings when people who were logging their sexual activity as a form of exercise learned that the data was showing up in Google searches. And in 2014, Jawbone faced criticism after it published data about how many people wearing its fitness tracker woke up during an earthquake in Northern California. People questioned whether Jawbone’s privacy and data-sharing policies had disclosed such use of their health data.

Fitness devices, including smartwatches, and mobile health or wellness apps are used by tens of millions of people worldwide. There are many such apps available in Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The data gathered can reveal much personal information about individuals. In the case of Strava, you could track patterns of activity over the two years’ worth of data. Read more »

In 2013, a man stole the name and Social Security Number of a child who died soon after his birth in 1974. “His new, clean record helped [Shawn] Gover got a job in 2016 as head of finances for a golf club in Powhatan, Va. Then he stole $33,557. The fake identity also helped him buy a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol despite his felony conviction,” the Washington Post reports. Recently, Gover, 47, was caught and recently sentenced to four years in prison on firearms and identity theft charges. Unfortunately, the theft of a child’s identity, and its use to facilitate fraud or other crimes, is not uncommon. And it can be easy to find and buy the SSNs. Researchers at Terbium Labs recently discovered a cache of children’s SSNs for sale online.

From the moment an infant receives her Social Security Number in the weeks after her birth, she is vulnerable to identity theft. Such thefts can be undetected for years, until a young adult attempts to apply for student or car loans or a credit card and learns someone has been using his name and SSN for years. (Identity theft is common for all ages, according to federal statistics. The latest figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found, “An estimated 17.6 million persons, or about 7 percent of U.S. residents age 16 or older, were victims of at least one incident of identity theft in 2014.”)

In a 2011 child identity theft report, Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab found: “4,311 or 10.2% of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security number – 51 times higher than the 0.2% rate for adults in the same population.” And: “The youngest victim was five months old; 303 victims were under the age of five.” The report “is based on identity protection scans on 42,232 children (age 18 and under) in the U.S during 2009-2010. This pool of 42,232 child identities includes everyone under 18 in a database of over 800,000 identity records.” And credit-reporting agency Experian has said it ^“handles 25,000-30,000 fraud cases each year and approximately 17% were targeted at children. According to Michael Bruemmer, Vice President of Consumer Protection for Experian, child identity fraud or theft will affect 25% of kids before turning 18.” Read more »

International Data Privacy Day is Sunday. There are a variety of events occurring this week to celebrate. Visit the official site to find events near your area. Take the time to think about how privacy is important in your life and how you can protect your rights from being infringed upon. Please also donate to any number of organizations out there trying to protect your privacy rights.

Today is Giving Tuesday, and here are a few consumer, privacy, and civil liberty groups that could use donations to continue to fight for your rights: ACLU national (or give to your local chapter), Center for Digital Democracy, Consumers Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Privacy International, and the World Privacy Forum.

There has been an ongoing privacy and ethics debate over the unauthorized or undisclosed use of newborns’ blood samples for purposes other than the standard disease-screening, which includes about 30 conditions. Now, there’s a trial study, called BabySeq, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital that “uses genomic sequencing to screen for about 1,800 conditions, including some cancers,” CBS Miami reports.

The privacy questions are clear: What happens to the DNA data — who keeps it, in what form, for how long — and who has access to it? The participants in the study have chosen to participate with, presumably, complete knowledge of the answers to these questions. But consider if the screening of 1,800 conditions, rather than the current 30, became the legal standard. This is a significant amount of highly personal information and there are substantial privacy issues.

BabySeq co-director, Dr. Robert Green, has raised some of these issues. “We can’t predict what kind of discrimination is going to be occurring by the time your child grows up,” Green said. “We can’t predict whether there’s some sort of privacy breaches, this information gets out and is used against your child in some sort of future scenario. And we, most importantly, we can’t predict the information’s accurate.” Read more »

We have discussed the privacy issues connected with targeted behavioral advertising before. This type of advertising is where a user’s online activity is tracked so that ads can be served based on the user’s behavior. What began as online data gathering has expanded — now there’s the online and offline data collection and tracking of the habits of consumers. For example, Google announced earlier this year that it “has begun using billions of credit-card transaction records” to try to connect individuals’ “digital trails to real-world purchase records in a far more extensive way than was possible before,” the Washington Post reported.

Some people are uncomfortable with the tracking and the targeting by companies and attempt to opt-out. (Opt-out puts the burden on consumers to learn about what the privacy policies are, whether they protect consumer data, whom the data is shared with and for what purpose, and how to opt-out of this data collection, use and sharing. Consumer advocates support opt-in policies, where companies have an incentive to create strong privacy protections and use limitations so consumers will choose to share their data.) In response, people have installed ad-blocker technology to avoid seeing ads. However, there is online-tracking technology that can be difficult to block, such as “canvas fingerprinting.”

People also have joined the Do Not Track movement — this can take the form of opting out of being tracked by e-mail address or by having your Web browser send an opt-out signal to a company as you conduct your online activity. And federal lawmakers have tried to pass Do Not Track legislation to protect kids.

There has been a battle. For example, Apple’s Safari browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser have included anti-tracking technology for years. However, some companies choose not to respect Do Not Track signals sent by Web browsers.  Read more »