There are app-enabled devices that track your fitness, wristbands that monitor your sleep patterns, eye glasses that act more or less like a smartphone. Technology has advanced so far that we’re swiftly moving away from handheld devices and into the world of wearing our tech at all times like a piece of clothing or favorite accessory. And like all jumps in technology, wearable tech is presenting unique challenges that the industry hasn’t had to worry about before.
This year, GigaOm is dedicating its annual Mobilize conference to the topic of pervasive mobility – inspired largely by the growing trend of wearable tech. From GigaOm:
While mobile penetration globally has reached 96.2 percent, we at GigaOM still think we are on the cusp of a mobile revolution.
But that revolution will occur outside of the cellular industry. It will happen as connected devices rely on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radios inside of phones or inside home networks. And eventually as Wi-Fi spreads and peer to peer networking technologies mature, it may even surpass cellular connectivity.
And as we embrace mesh networks or Wi-Fi in more places for our devices we’re going to start sending more data back to the companies that provide us our email, our storage, our apps. …
Fast forward through the launch of the first Motorola Android device on our stage to debates over native versus web apps on mobile devices to today, where mobility is more than what happens on the handset. Now, the pervasiveness of computing is everywhere in our daily lives.
This pervasiveness will lead to great new opportunities, but it will also make people even more vulnerable. Before computers, thieves needed to access paper information or steal a piece of physical mail to co-op your identity. With computers, getting access to personal information became easier. Mobile opened up another world of opportunity and vulnerability. And now wearable tech is facing another set of challenges.
In 2012, a group of hackers found that they could corrupt Google Glass with a simple QR code that the eye piece would scan automatically. Google Glass uses QR codes to connect the device to WiFi networks. At the time of the hack, it would automatically scan any code it came across, without any command from the user. This left the vulnerability door wide open. From Forbes:
Lookout’s researchers, who reported the bug to Google and have already helped the company issue a fix for the flaw, found that they could craft malformed QR codes that when photographed crashed Glass or connected the headset to a rogue Wifi hotspot capable of stripping away the encryption on the device’s communications or directing it to a malicious website designed to take full control of the device. …
[Lookout researcher Marc] Rogers imagines a scenario where someone wearing a T-shirt showing a maliciously crafted QR code could “photobomb” a user, inserting himself in the back of the scene and causing the headset to scan the attacker’s code. Rogers even printed sample malicious QR code stickers that could be planted on top of innocuous QR codes on advertisements or other signs to trick unsuspecting Glass users. …
Wearable computing devices may be especially vulnerable, as the keyboard-less devices could depend on QR codes for inputting precise text strings like the names and passwords of Wifi networks, as Glass does.
Google addressed the issue quickly and said that the early, limited, release of Glass is intended specifically to find potential issues and vulnerabilities that Googlers didn’t think of.
“We take security very seriously at Glass,” a Google Glass spokesperson writes to me in an email, adding that one of the goals of its beta-testing “Explorer” program for Glass is to “discover vulnerabilities that we can research and work to address before we launch it more broadly.”
Which brings us to today’s lesson. Wearable tech is such a new field that developers simply will not – and cannot – imagine every scenario these devices will encounter. Jawbone’s first attempt at the Up was recalled and reworked because the company realized it hadn’t done enough real-world based testing. In-the-wild testing is extremely helpful for web and mobile developers to ensure their apps work on the wide range of devices, operating systems, versions, carriers and locations that users expect the app to work in. But in-the-wild testing will be absolutely essential to anyone dealing with wearable tech. Developers simply cannot take the risk of the technology failing in the field. At best, failed wearable tech will disappoint a user and necessitate a recall. At worse, you put a users’ personal information at risk – possibly without them even realizing. From Forbes:
[Android developer Jay Freeman] warned that Glass’s ability to watch a user’s entire life meant that compromising the device could allow serious breaches of privacy. “Nothing is safe once your Glass has been hacked,” Freeman wrote.“A bugged Glass doesn’t just watch your every move: it watches everything you are looking at (intentionally or furtively) and hears everything you do. The only thing it doesn’t know are your thoughts.”
At this point in time I think it’s fair to say that each new step in technology will become a little more invasive in our everyday lives. We left desktops behind for laptops. Traded in computers for smartphones and tablets. Now we’re starting to wear the technology. As it becomes easier to integrate tech into our lives, it also becomes easier for that technology to fail us in a major way and for hackers to gain access to information we’d rather keep guarded. Wearable tech is so intrenstically linked to the person using it, their personal information and their identity, that developers can’t take that risk. Testing in-the-wild will help identify problems before they effect users.