Why You Need to Handle Wearable Tech with Extra Care

Wearable gizmos are all a buzz  in the technology world these days. Tech biggies, such as- Apple, Google, Samsung, etc., have gone to this market all guns blazing, while the more established wearable specialized brands, like- Fitbit and Athos, have already settled in a comfortable niche. This competition has brought about some good results for consumers – we have now got a number of gadgets that can cover almost the entire human body and help to improve our productivity, keep us more connected with smartphones, count the quantity of air we inhale or exhale, the intake and the burning of calories and much more.

There are perhaps an endless number of uses that wearable technologies can serve the users with and obviously, the tech-savvy users are enjoying working with them as well. However, some unfriendly minds can take advantages of these devices to cause harm on many fronts. From health to data security, these wearable devices can, if mistreated, cause annoyances – professionally as well as personally. Let’s look at these in more detail.

Smartwatch

Smartwatch or wearable bands are available on the market in plentiful numbers coming in many shapes and sizes, they are becoming more widespread and varied than many sci-fi writers could imagine. Their compatibility with the smartphone is one of its biggest advantages as they can read you the texts, emails, and other phone messages. They support users with incoming calls as well. Many of them are also compatible with various apps that help the users immensely in uplifting their productivity. However, this smooth compatibility can easily be the reason of damage as well. Smartwatch are wireless devices and that makes it susceptible for the attacker to intrude without any physical or wired connection by intercepting the data as its sent through the air.

Intruding into the Smartwatch, the attacker can access a considerable amount of the information on the phone, especially with regards to emails and messaging apps. Given that emails, mostly, are the path to the password of many other accounting applications, such attack can be lethal for the users and even for the enterprise they serve.

Optical Wearable

With optical devices, we will take a look at wearable cameras. The wearable cameras can take videos or grab pictures of all that the user’s eyes are exposed to. Some of them are even GPS-enabled, so they can track the location where pictures were taken. They are prominently used by many forces and several police forces and other services have adopted them, but they are not very common with other users just yet. However, it is gaining admirers slowly. Many among those admirers are unaware of the risk that they can put you in.

Optical wearable can sting in two ways depending on who is wearing it. A foreign party can steal your personal details (which could even be your payment card details) in High Definition, which has been left visible to the optical wearable. In another scenario, if the wearable is not properly secured then the lack of defense for keeping captured videos or images safe can cause the bite. this is because many of the  VR (Virtual Reality) wearable devices  with wireless accessibility could be susceptible to hack attacks.

Other Physical Activity Tracking Devices

Optical and wrist-tied wearable devices conclude almost all the risks on the professional ground for the users. But some wearable offer health, wellness, and fitness tracking feature. From the steps that you walk to the rate at which your heart beats, they promise to list down almost all health measuring parameters.

However, there have been reports about the errors with their recording abilities. Some of the users even stated that wearing such devices creates a psychological burden on the mind, which is not positive. All this eventually fails the purpose of using these wearable. With some wearable devices of greater abilities, such as wireless pacemakers, things can go nasty because some of them are vulnerable to hacks as well and can be remotely controlled. So, the same security concerns are equally threatening in this case as for the previously mentioned sections in this article.

Summing It all up

A small band on your wrist can vibrate to wake you up at the time you want, let you take calls, read you the texts, emails, etc., and regularly track your health. All in all, they can help your stay healthy and at the same time enhance your productivity by many folds. The features and abilities of these gadgets have kept on growing, but their security was not seriously considered until recently. The scene is now changing, but anything credible with the security is yet to appear. So, the user themselves have to be little careful while using wearable techs. always set strong passwords, and change default pass codes for things like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections to keep you safe.

This guest post was written by Nishant Kadian,  a technical writer and formally associated with Ace Cloud Hosting. He has a strong interest in accounting software, cloud computing and QuickBooks Cloud.Smartphone, computer, and internet are his best friends and he spends most part of his waking time with them.