What Data Is Your Smart Gadget Tracking Right Now?

Look around you. Your smartwatch is on your wrist, your smartphone is at hand, and a smart speaker is listening in the room. We consider smart devices to be helpful gadgets that are always ready to respond to our touch or voice command. However, they do not actually turn off when we are done interacting with them. They keep working while we sleep, collecting and analyzing hundreds of various types of valuable data about our bodies, residences, and behaviors.

The following information provides insight into the specific information smart devices can accumulate about a human and how it can be applied.

1. Real-Time Biometrics and Physiological States

If you're wearing a fitness tracker or Smartwatch, it's on your body and monitoring you like a medical device:

• PPG Sensors: These use quick flashes of green and infrared light against your skin. They calculate how much blood is flowing through your veins. It will count your heartbeat, how fast it moves through your body, and your oxygen level in your blood, called SpO2. Your watch can tell how stressed or tired you are and your emotional response by the small fluctuations in your heartbeat and small shifts in sweat on your skin.
• Micro-Movement & Sleep Architecture: Accelerometers and gyroscopes watch for small movements of your wrist to detect if you're typing, walking, semi-asleep, or in a deep REM sleep.

2. Micro-Location and Spatial Telemetry

You don't need to have a mapping app on your phone to know your position in the real world.

• Indoor Positioning through Beaconing: Your phone searches for nearby Wi-Fi routers and Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. Even if you turn off your GPS, your phone can find your general location within a few feet by using data from crowdsourcing databases to triangulate your position.
• Barometric pressure: Phones today have barometers that can detect changes in pressure as you navigate up or down stairs or move from one floor of a shopping mall to another.
• Motion sensors: They can detect how you carry your phone, your velocity, and whether it is in your front pocket, back pocket, or bag.

3. Ambient Environmental Signals

Smart devices such as thermostats, robot vacuums, and TVs can gather information about their surroundings.

• Acoustic buffers: They use something called acoustic buffers, which allow for the recording of specific sounds that prompt the devices to carry out specific tasks. Although an entire recording may not be uploaded, certain metrics like decibels or patterns of activity within the house and the like are sometimes captured and stored in a database.
• Robot vacuums: They use LiDAR or video cameras to perform simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and can build a 3D model of their surroundings. These vacuums can calculate square footage, the placement of furniture, and identify cluttered spaces.
• Automated Content Recognition (ACR): It works by allowing smart TVs to analyze pixels and sound several times per second in order to access a cloud-based database and instantly recognize what is being watched or played.

4. Behavioral Fingerprinting & Interaction Metrics

The way you use your devices creates a biometric ID as unique as your fingerprint.

• Keystroke Dynamics: The way you type and the patterns of your typing habits, such as speed, key depressions, and the time intervals between them, all create a unique pattern that acts as a fingerprint for your typing style.
• Touch Surface Heatmaps: The touch surface on touch screen devices can reveal the size of your touches, how much pressure you apply, scrolling speed, fine motor control movements while reading, and other indicators of engagement and emotional response to the content.
• Battery Drain & Sensor Polling Logs: Logs of battery drain and sensor polling cycles can reveal operating applications, network activity, and connection events as well as connection to external devices.

Why Does This Data Matter?

Individual data points, such as a sudden increase in heart rate or a Wi-Fi scan, may appear innocuous on their own. When aggregated by data brokers and interpreted by platform algorithms, such data points can be combined to build a psychological profile of the user. By combining such data points, companies can infer not only the physical location of the users but also their emotional state, level of fatigue due to lack of sleep, boredom, and susceptibility to advertising and propensity to make purchases.

Biometrics (Stress / Fatigue)
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Location (Home / Work / Retail)  ───►  Predictive Behavior Profile
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Screen Telemetry (Attention Span)

3 Quick Steps to Reclaim Control

Check your phone's privacy settings. In the permissions tab, make sure nothing is allowing apps to access any of the above-mentioned services without a reason. To turn off ACR on your smart TV, go to your TV's settings, likely under Privacy or Terms of Service, and turn off Viewing Data, Live Plus, and Automated Content Recognition. Set up a separate Guest network on your router for your smart devices; this way they can't interfere with other electronics like your laptop or phone.

What smart device do you use the most, and have you checked their privacy settings? Let's discuss in the comments below!