Physiological Data: Challenges for Privacy and Ethics

TL;DR

This paper discusses the ethical and privacy challenges posed by the widespread use of physiological data from wearable devices, highlighting potential misuse and the need for better understanding of data implications.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the privacy and ethical issues associated with physiological data from wearables and discusses potential future misuse scenarios.

Findings

Physiological data can reveal private information about users.

Pairing physiological with non-physiological data increases predictive power.

Current technology can be misused in ways users and developers may not anticipate.

Abstract

Wearable devices that measure and record physiological signals are now becoming widely available to the general public with ever-increasing affordability and signal quality. The data from these devices introduce serious ethical challenges that remain largely unaddressed. Users do not always understand how these data can be leveraged to reveal private information about them and developers of these devices may not fully grasp how physiological data collected today could be used in the future for completely different purposes. We discuss the potential for wearable devices, initially designed to help users improve their well-being or enhance the experience of some digital application, to be appropriated in ways that extend far beyond their original intended purpose. We identify how the currently available technology can be misused, discuss how pairing physiological data with non-physiological data can radically expand the predictive capacity of physiological wearables, and explore the implications of these expanded capacities for a variety of stakeholders.