Carnival in Brazil, servers down (back just as soon as the party finished). Coincidence?…

Anyway, back to normal, I was reading a lot of articles and stories about Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) theses days. One of stories on the media this week was about the possibility of fitness tracking devices knowing its user is pregnant even before any clear body signal of it. The story was about a user reporting problems with his wife’s Fitbit wrist tracker that apparently were getting all readings wrong. After a while the company realised there wasn’t any problem with the product, but that his wife’s body was changing, suggesting she could be pregnant…

This story immediately reminds us the famous Target case when the company asked its statisticians to discover pregnant customers as they are more likely to change their consumer habits, preferably in their second trimestre (when they start shopping for the newcomer).

Any doubt that in this “smart future” our gadgets (and retailers) will know more and more about us and compromise more and more of our privacy and our choices?

Day 67: Your gadgets know a lot about you!