How Your Heart Rate Monitor Could Help Criminals, University of Edinburgh Study Reveals

Wearable technology devices can measure heart rate, count steps and track sleeping habits — but they can also reveal a wealth of sensitive information about their users’ daily activities to hackers.

Gadgets in the fitness tracker industry are insufficiently secured and could leak personal information to third parties, a new study from the University of Edinburgh distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research found. Scientists there looked at two top selling models from Fitbit and found data could be intercepted as it was being transmitted from devices to cloud servers where it is sent for storage and analysis.

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