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research article

Wearable Activity Trackers: A Survey on Utility, Privacy, and Security

Niksirat, Kavous Salehzadeh  
•
Velykoivanenko, Lev
•
Zufferey, Noe
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July 1, 2024
Acm Computing Surveys

Over the past decade, wearable activity trackers (WATs) have become increasingly popular. However, despite many research studies in different fields (e.g. psychology, health, and design), few have sought to jointly examine the critical aspects of utility (i.e., benefits brought by these devices), privacy, and security (i.e., risks and vulnerabilities associated with them). To fill this gap, we reviewed 236 studies that researched the benefits of using WATs, the implications for the privacy of users of WATs, and the security vulnerabilities of these devices. Our survey revealed that these devices expose users to several threats. For example, WAT data can be mined to infer private information, such as the personality traits of the user. Whereas many works propose empirical findings about users' privacy perceptions and their behaviors in relation to privacy, we found relatively few studies researching technologies to better protect users' privacy with these devices. This survey contributes to systematizing knowledge on the utility, privacy, and security of WATs, shedding light on the state-of-the-art approaches with these devices, and discussing open research opportunities.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1145/3645091
Web of Science ID

WOS:001208811000022

Author(s)
Niksirat, Kavous Salehzadeh  
Velykoivanenko, Lev
Zufferey, Noe
Cherubini, Mauro
Huguenin, Kevin
Humbert, Mathias
Date Issued

2024-07-01

Publisher

Assoc Computing Machinery

Published in
Acm Computing Surveys
Volume

56

Issue

7

Start page

183

Subjects

Technology

•

Wearable Activity Tracker

•

Fitness Tracker

•

Privacy

•

Security

•

Utility

•

Survey

•

Literature Review

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
SPRING  
FunderGrant Number

Swiss National Science Foundation

200021_178978

armasuisse S+T

CYD-C-2020007

Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)

200021_178978

Available on Infoscience
June 5, 2024
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/208263
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