From heart rate monitors and activity trackers to smart medical devices that track blood pressure, wearable technology is seemingly everywhere. But for all the benefits these technologies offer, they also collect massive amounts of data—and that comes with potential security risks.
As the wearables market continues to grow, manufacturers will need to balance providing an optimal user experience with customer trust and privacy concerns. According to recent industry data, the wearables market is set to grow nearly 20% by 2026. It's clear that wearable technology is no longer just a trend. It has become a valuable tool for gathering data and empowers people to improve their everyday lives. However, as more consumers adopt these products, companies will have to navigate how to provide as much functionality as possible while keeping sensitive data secure.
The future of wearable technology: Assessing the security risks
Wearables come with distinct hardware, software and network security risks.
Wearables collect and transfer data between devices and systems, which means data must travel over a network to get to its intended destination. If a network isn't completely secure, the data traveling across it could potentially be compromised, and hackers could gain unauthorized access to it. From there, they may sell this private information or encrypt the data and demand a ransom.
Ransomware attacks have already doubled year over year, according to the Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report. Though all these attacks aren't associated with wearable technology alone, wearable technology companies will need to fully embrace a security-first approach as they develop, enhance and bring more of these products to market.
While network security is one issue, hardware and software security poses another issue. Some devices may come with security gaps if security wasn't prioritized in the development life cycle when the product was built. In some cases, the authentication methods a company uses to allow users to access a wearable device also aren't strong enough and can be easily infiltrated by hackers.
Balancing customer trust and convenience
These security gaps can undermine consumers' trust, especially if a breach occurs. However, manufacturers can take several steps to safeguard the data they collect while giving their customers the best user experience possible.
First, companies need to build their products with data security in mind. For example, many organizations are now employing a development security operations (DevSecOps) approach to ensure security and IT development teams work more closely throughout every stage of the application development life cycle. Along with regularly testing application performance throughout the development process, a DevSecOps approach ensures the right balance between application functionality and application security.
Companies should also regularly audit and conduct vulnerability testing on their products to understand their current security gaps. The threat landscape is rapidly evolving, and nearly every month there is a new security threat that poses a risk to organizations, so companies must have the right governance policies and processes in place to stay on top of this changing threat environment.
They must also have a holistic cyber risk strategy focused on both prevention and mitigation in the event of a breach. Preventing a breach is only one facet of effective cybersecurity—effective incident response, disaster recovery and the ability to quickly restore users' data are all just as important.
Additionally, wearable technology companies should take steps to educate their users by providing information on their website, blog and social media channels about ways they can be actively involved in protecting their own data. For example, sharing password security best practices and encouraging users to regularly change their password and not use the same password across multiple devices and systems is one way to reduce the security risks associated with wearables.
Forging greater customer trust in wearables
Companies don't need to compromise security to improve the performance of wearable technology. In fact, Verizon's recent report, The Human Connection, found that consumers will more readily forgive a device malfunction than they would forgive company use of their data in ways they didn't expect. Consumers must have trust in how companies store, access and share their data. This also means they must have faith that the companies gathering their data are doing everything in their power to protect it.
Wearables are here to stay, but for these technologies to perform effectively and not compromise customer trust, security can never come last—it must always come first.
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The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.