The answer lies in our everyday life—the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things, as coined by Kevin Ashton in the mid-90s, simply refers to widespread device connectivity. Then, the term was referring to the growing technology market, from Radio Frequency Identifiers (RFID) to trackable implants to help make medical information more accessible in a time of need. Now, the Internet of Things is a system in which the Internet is connected to the physical world via a network of differing types of sensors.
Today, many devices can sense the nature of things: mobility, weather, habits, etc. How does this interaction help move our culture forward? In our highly "social forward" society, people want to interact and want to become emotionally connected to one another, even through and with the use of technology. A technology that, due to the rapid popularity of fitness trackers and health apps, has led to an influx of inexperienced companies flooding the market with products.
It makes you wonder: How does this affect our privacy now and in the future?
The rush to get new products into the marketplace, propelled by companies looking to get the product to market as quickly and as cheaply as possible, could lead to products that have security imperfections. For instance, as long as a fitness tracker can track someone’s results, that person doesn’t often question how secure the data related to those results can be. Most people don’t consider the complexity of simple devices. While the data that are collected may border on the mundane, the devices are generally tethered to other devices via Bluetooth, etc. The relationship between the tethered device and the tracker (or "companion device") is where the concern should lie.
Today's social world has always raised a concern over privacy. The modern concept of privacy has many levels and is ever changing. While the nature of personal information and the amount of information that is shared can vary by age, geographic location, culture and other factors, people freely give away an abundance of that information over social networks among friends, colleagues, and, in some instances, complete strangers. This social freedom opens the door for more personalized data mining.
Data mining lends itself as a way to help plan for how this social interaction will improve advertising. How well are brands advertised and adopted? Is this due to the advertising itself, or to the familiarity garnered and shared by those using the products? Perhaps the sharing is influenced not by the product advertising, but by the user’s brand loyalty? Seeing the way photos are shared lends itself to the fact that people desire to share their personal information via technology, thus tying them to people they may not have a close physical relationship with (spatially) but across vast distances in an instant.
Regardless of the social path, we are always led back to the issue of security. How do we build trust with consumers? The first step is to build the security infrastructure. The second step is to give consumers access to their data and how it is used — putting control of the data back into the hands of the user.
What about from the perspective of wearable technology? Companies like MapMyFitness give users a platform to not only track their personal data, but to share that data with others on social networks. This is the Internet of Things in practice. When you look at the benefit of wearables in today’s market, you are talking about a singular purpose serving the singular user. No one is garnering any real, marketable value from wearables yet. We are simply aggregating and gaining experiential knowledge, but nothing that aids in truly assisting in changing or bettering our habits. Just giving us the information to act upon – if we choose to act.
Consider the future of wearable technology: Under Armour has been concepting apparel with wearable technology built-in. Their CEO postulated that he would not cede to a technology company developing apparel to fit the technology; rather, that he would prefer to become the apparel company that develops the technology.
All in all, this forces us to view these insights as the melding of technology and marketing, and not treating the two as disparate paths. In fact, Technology and Marketing individually, or even combined, are not enough. There must be a holistic combination of Technology and Business. In order to bring the technology truly into practice, we need to focus on advertising that has a more personal approach that would encourage the use of the technology—but not based on the technology.
