Smart wachtes — wrists that talk
So you still use your watch only to know if you’re late for work?
What if you could check the weather or call someone without taking your phone from the pocket?
Smart watches are connected platforms used for interacting with smartphones and potentially other connected devices to complete a variety of tasks, from retrieving SMS messages and emails to streaming music and screening calls.
Such technology was made available in mid-2013 despite early developments.
Their development through different sizes, capacities and shapes brought serenity to the human impetus: higher reaction speed, less risks and more convenience since now we can save our phone’s precious battery life, leaving it to rest in the pocket.
For smart cities a smart watch means usefulness: a new gateway of opportunities, a new gateway of connectivity.
Now we can access our reservations to restaurants, communicate with smart devices around our house, check the daily/weekly schedule, making payments right away and even using it as our personal trainer!
Everything possible with just a small tap on our watch: seems strange right? But this is the funny thing about technology, like Arthur Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And we like magic, don’t we?
But even in the magical world we have the evil temptation. How are smart watches storing information about calendars, e-mails, contacts, payments or even health data? There is no clear information at the moment and that is a matter of concern.
Business Implication
In late 2015 HP published a study about attack vulnerability on smart watches.
The study revealed flaws in the cloud-based systems smartwatches use to store data, a lack of sufficient user authentication and data that is open to exploitation by hackers.
“The study conducted by HP Fortify found that 100 percent of the tested smartwatches contain significant vulnerabilities, including insufficient authentication, lack of encryption and privacy concerns”
Possible Solutions
“Consumers are buying these systems and then connecting them to corporate devices. So information from the corporate side could be exposed via the insecure communication between phone and watch”
Businesses should draw up and enforce an IoT and bring your own device policy and educate staff about the risks.
Creating policies for managing IoT and wearables in the enterprise, whether that’s creating isolated segments on the LAN [or] determining what types of devices and capabilities are allowed in.
Plans to manage the apps that will be accessed on the devices.
Include new types of passwords (using fingerprints, for example) in order to keep us safe and sound!
I hope you like this new topic and that you will buy a smart watch right away but not with the purpose to cheat on exams! I know you guys are creative!
