SoylentNews

c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Australian Broadcast Corporation reports [abc.net.au] on the "signs of out time", like health insurance's reliance on gadgets to assess a healthy life style, privacy issues and trust/security:

In a perfect world, we'd all walk 10,000 steps a day. But if you find looking at your fitness tracker a bit depressing, these US artists may have a solution. Unfit Bits [unfitbits.com] is a satirical project, prompted by a recent push for insurance customers to share their health data. It offers creative ways to "spoof" your stats - without taking a step.

Tega Brain is a New York-based artist and data engineer who, together with Surya Mattu, developed Unfit Bits.

"Unfit Bits is a project that presents solutions and ways that you might be able to spoof your fitness data," Ms Brain said.

"So you might be able to create or fabricate a fitness dataset that makes it look like you are much more active than maybe you are."

On the Unfit Bits website you can find a bunch of innovative — and comic — ways to fake your fitness data, such as attaching your fitness tracker to a dog or a metronome.
...
But as funny as watching a video of an office worker spin her fitness device on a power drill is, there's also a serious side to the Unfit Bits project.

It was created as a reaction to the a number of insurance companies, supermarkets, big business and even universities, starting to trade incentives for access to individuals' health and fitness data.

"For one, it seems that privacy is set to become this luxury, where if you can afford not to need discounts, you can afford not to share your fitness dataset with someone like your insurance company," she said.

"If I wear a Fitbit and I sign up to one of these reward programs, I'm not really sure what's happening with my data, and who it might be sold to or what that looks like."

It is a situation that has all sorts of implications for privacy, both now and in the future.

Anyone remembers the Cobra effect [wikipedia.org]? On the line of the "signs of our time", what the Soylentnews dwellers think it is most likely to happen:

1. the health insurance companies fall back onto common sense and stop pretending a healthy life style can be assessed by gadgets
2. the health insurance industry lobbies for regulations to include "spoofing your health data" under DCMA violations?

What other fitness device data would you spoof and how?

Original Submission