Issues and Concerns over Privacy, Security, and Confidentiality in Wearable Technology

本文的目的是劝说加拿大隐私专员Jennifer Stoddart对制定可穿戴设备展示了对隐私的威胁而制定的法律法规,

Acknowledgements

Audience and Purpose
          The audience of this paper is Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The purpose of this paper is to persuade her to make new laws and regulations on the privacy issue of wearable technology by introducing the history and development of wearable technology and demonstrating the hidden threat to privacy. 
Introduction
While wearable technology has been around for decades, it hasn’t been widely used by consumers until recent technological trends that have made electronic devices much smaller and more portable. Lots of people consider innovative wearable technology such as Google Glass and the Apple Watch as the future of computing. However, wearable technology has significant risks in terms of privacy issue and regulations on this growing technology field haven’t been very clear. As such new technologies continue to paly a major role in everyday consumer’s life, new legislations and policies will be required to govern its usage. This paper will give you an introduction on wearable technology, analyze the hidden threat to privacy and give some suggestion on this issue. 
Brief Introduction to Wearable Technology
First of all, we need to know that wearable technology is part of a much larger field of technological innovation, known as “ubiquitous computing”(Skiba, 2004). This term describes technology that is not so noticeable, and can be operated in an open environment but only in the background. They are made to appear everywhere and anywhere and they can be used on any electronic devices at ant time. Ubiquitous computing has been used in the medical field for many years. Early networking enabled implanted technologies, part of the handheld/wearable wired (HWW) device family (Pietro & Mancini, 2003, p. 75-79) to send information to medical professionals. This removes the need for in-person checkups for machines such as pacemakers and electrocardiograms (Meingast, Roosta & Sastry, 2006, p. 5453-5458). Today, wearable technologies have found its way to the consumer market. Accessories using wearable technology such as Google Glass and the upcoming Apple Watch will have many features of electronic devices. While many business policies have been created for the use of mobile devices, it is unclear whether these can extend to articles of clothing (Tsukayama, 2013). 
           Unlike other electronic devices, such as cell phone and tablet, wearable technology has a feature of inconspicuousness. A mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet, is easily recognized for what it is, but a shoe with a computer chip that monitors speed, gait, and environmental obstacles (of which other people are a part of) to be recorded and uploaded to a network is not likely to be noticed by people. This unique feature of wearable technology will cause some problems. What happen if one person, without other person’s consent, record or collect personal information about other people by using wearable technology? Will it be a crime? If so, what is the punishment? There are still many questions around wearable technology that need to be answered, especially legal questions. 
Hidden Threat of Wearable Technology to Privacy
Wearable technology has become increasingly popular in our work and personal life. This trend has some risks that you might not realize. In work place, if your colleague uses wearable technology, he or she may record or collect your personal information or confidential information about the company by purpose or by accident. However, because the device is not noticeable, no one would know that. When you use wearable technology in your daily life, the device will collect and restore detailed information about you. These data might be sold or send to “various types of information agents who would extract relevant data and fuse them into usable form” (Lu&Mylopouls, 2002). These information agents include “meta-searchers”, “meditator” (Baru, Gupta, Ludaescher, Marciano, Papakonstantinou,Veikhow, 1999) and “information broker” (Decker, Sycara, Williamson, 1996). They will analyze your data to find out who you are and then sell your information to companies for target marketing. However, you have no idea that this is happening.   
          From the examples above, it is clear that our privacy can be easily violated and it is difficult to protect. “Privacy protection for the past 40 years have concentrated on two types of procedural mitigations: informed consent and anonymization” (Barocas, Solon; Nissenbaum, Helen, 2014, p. 31-33). However, these two things are hard to do when using wearable technology. Firstly，it has something to do with its “invisibility”. Devices using wearable technology are usually small and unnoticeable. Because of that, our privacy can be intruded without our realization. Furthermore, if the information is abused, there can be no trace of evident. The second issue is what happen to the data collected by wearable devices or other electronic devices for that matter. “As increasingly powerful large-scale scientific instruments come online… they are starting to churn out more data than even the most powerful massively parallel supercomputer can handle”(Wright, Alex, 2004, p. 13-15), we are now in the era of Big Data. Everything is digitalized and recorded. These data contained detailed information about you. “As with open source code and openly licensed content, support for open data has been steadily building” (Daries, Justin, Waldo, Young, Jonathan, Thomas, Issac, 2014, p. 56-63). The result of open data is that data can be analyzed. They can say a lot about who you are. With wearable technology, more and more private information about the details of your life would be collected.  Once they are collected, what will happen to them? One version is that these data will be sold by data brokers to companies that need them, then they will analyze your data and to know what kind of person your are, what is your consumption habits and other private information about you. It is known as “Data Mining”, which can be “used to mine valuable knowledge of enterprises for use in decision-making” (Witten IH, Frank E, 2005). Would it considered to be privacy violation? There are already several precedents on this issue. Google was accused of collecting and storing customer cell phone information without getting their consent and it cause backlash among consumers. From that, we can see that definitely counts as privacy violation. 
Suggestion 
           There hasn’t been a comprehensive legal structure to govern the use of wearable technology. Given the popularity of wearable technology, it is alarming that no laws or regulations are made to help solve legal issues on this matter.  This issue needs our attention. In work place,“they have to be very clear on how and why employees use wearable technology, make sure they are clear what the rules are, and that they have taken adequate precautions to comply with privacy regulations and the law” (Goodwin, 2014). In society, laws and regulation should be made to make sure that no one would take advantage of this loophole to gain profit or to do harm.
        It is indeed a daunting task to build a comprehensive legal structure to cover this issue.  There is even not a comprehensive legal structure to regulate the use of other electronic devices, let alone regulate the use of unnoticeable wearable devices. However, we still need to take the first step. Fortunately, there are already some legal precedents about the privacy issue on electronic devices. It is a good idea to refer to these precedents when making laws and regulations on this matter. Besides learning from our past experience, “today regulators are casting a more hopeful eye at technology. They are looking to harness technical design to advance and protect privacy”(Mulligan, Deirdre, Bamberger, Kenneth, 2013, p. 20-23). This is called “Privacy by design”(Mulligan, Deirdre, Bamberger, Kenneth, 2013, p. 20-23). Making higher standard and legal restriction on the design of electronic devices to prevent privacy intrusion is also a way to deal with this issue. Furthermore, restriction on data mining should be made as soon as possible. “Two decades ago, experts were already warning that data mining posed insurmountable challenges to the foundations of emerging privacy law”(O’Leary, D.E, 1995, p. 48-59). As data mining becomes more like a normal thing, we need restriction on data mining to get rid of the roadblock to pass privacy law.
          With the privacy law specifically for wearable technology in the future, our privacy would be better protected and the people who violate other people’s privacy would be punished in accordance with regulations and laws. Privacy law has always been a hot topic for many years, especially with the emergence of Internet, electronic devices and wearable technology. Although it is very difficult to make such law that can clearly define the legal boundary in such blurry issue, I believe that with more debate and discussion among lawmakers and citizen and more experience we gain as we go, it is possible to put such law in place. The establishment of privacy law will have great influence on the governance of Internet and internet-related industries and it will help law enforcement better regulate these industries and keep everything in order. 
Conclusion
Wearable technology will definitely have a huge influence on our lives. Using wearable technology can even prevent crime. There is an article explaining how it works: “Existing monitoring systems rely heavily on location-based monitoring methods, which have incomplete geographic coverage and do not provide information on illegal firearm use.”(Loeffler, Charles E, 2014, p. 1-6) Its huge influence naturally comes with great consequences. Looking back on the development of technology and Internet, it is clearly that these developments have made our life better but it also made lots of problem more complicated. Privacy has always been at the center of these problems. The use of electronic devices makes our privacy more vulnerable to violation. Laws and regulations are our weapon to defend ourselves from the deprivation of privacy and we need to sharpen our weapon so as to not get hurt by people who try to use electronic devices to invade our privacy. The privacy issue is still the hot topic in the development of wearable technology. This problem has been discussed and debated many time during the development of electronic devices and Internet. Although there is still no clear and all-around legal structure to govern our online activities and use of electronic devices, we can learn something from these discussion and debates and take lessons from our prior experience, so as to steer our way in tacking with the privacy issue of wearable technology. The first step is to recognize the problem in advance so we can put laws and regulations in place in advance. By doing that, we would not be caught unprepared when facing the problem.