Young Adults' Privacy Concerns about Wearable Technology

Wearable technology is defined as a group of devices which can be worn at human body. Wearable technology can have positive impact on quality of life especially in regard to tracking physical or mental health. The most used wearable technologies are smartwatches, Google glasses, fitness trackers and safety wearables. Wearable technology has numerous advantages such as visualization of everyday life in real time and support for decision making, interoperability with other devices like smartphones and computers, recognition of disease symptoms as well as some emotions and moods. Furthermore, some experts perceive wearable technology as human's sixth sense thus it can process information which other senses cannot process. In this paper was conducted research among 218 young adults in Croatia regarding their privacy concerns about wearable technology. The research results revealed that although young adults accentuated a lot of advantages of wearable technology, a majority of them pointed out following disadvantages of wearable technology: (1) high price, (2) possibilities of access and theft of personal data, (3) unwanted surveillance and (4) impossibility of permanent erasure of personal data.