“Sensitive but Essential Information”

Abstract

As fitness trackers and applications grow popular, many actors involved in the development, use, and regulation of these devices expressed concerns of privacy and control of data gathered through these platforms. This chapter explores how government representatives, industry leaders, regulators, and politicians discursively constructed and critiqued data privacy in fitness applications in congressional contexts. Findings indicate the following discourses: (1) fitness trackers as indicative of larger data collection issues, (2) weighing the pros and cons of use, (3) military implications for fitness application data security, (4) consumers as responsible for their own data privacy, (5) organizations failing to keep pace with cyber security threats, and (6) the misuse of data collected in fitness applications for promotion/strategic communication uses.