
Fitness trackers and cyber security

Personal data when “stolen” is processed by Big Data technologies. Each profile becomes a valuable set of bytes that can be stored anywhere, depending on the interest that the company or person can find there.
Safety of fitness trackers: what are the dangers?
Wearable fitness devices also use intelligent sensors that can help identify movements. These data may be of interest to those involved in urban planning, city traffic control, targeted advertising. But this is nothing compared to the implications in health care and insurance: knowing that a person moves little, does less exercise, sleeps badly compared to the previous year could make you understand that he is more exposed to health problems or (for example) to the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Cyber criminals may sell the information they collect to external companies, advertising and marketing agencies, or entities that are interested in the data in order to design tailor-made advertising campaigns.

In short, data theft is never only a damage for those who suffer it, but weakens all online security because it brings to the dark web market a large amount of information that can be exploited for further attacks.
The MyFitnessPal case
The most serious issue of this breach, other than the fact that they entered into possession of extremely confidential data, was the fact that hackers discovered the password used for MyFitnessPal. Since people normally use the same keyword for multiple apps and different services, by having both email and passwords those hackers could have tried to breach much more easily also into other services.
