Abstract
The wearable health device and location-sharing technology industries have built their markets on a promise that digital tools are solely designed to serve you. My STS research, examining the wearable health device industry through the lens of care ethics, finds that this promise is systematically broken. Companies prioritize data extraction over user protection through insecure infrastructure, deliberately confusing consent mechanisms, and opt-out tracking defaults. My technical project proposes a location-sharing social application for UVA's dance community, Cavalier Cyphers, that treats user well-being as a design requirement instead of an afterthought. Combined, these projects address a question that affects billions globally: is it possible to build technology that monitors location or health data with user protection at its core?
The technical problem I investigated is the fragmentation of UVA's dance community. Despite hundreds of students dancing across Grounds in styles ranging from hip-hop to contemporary to cultural forms, no centralized platform exists for them to find each other in real time. This gap means that collaborative opportunities are lost and campus dance spaces are under-utilized. In a study by Lindqvist et al. (2011), they found that real-time location-sharing significantly increased unprompted social gatherings, with 30% of users of a location-based social media service meeting new people through it. The same study found that in-depth user control mechanisms are essential to success. My proposed solution is Cavalier Cyphers, an application that allows dancers to discover and join live dance sessions happening around them in real time. Most importantly, location sharing is entirely user-initiated: the app never passively collects or broadcasts location, all sessions auto-expire, and authentication is restricted to verified UVA community members through NetBadge OAuth2. I expect that Cavalier Cyphers would meaningfully connect the community while ensuring the safety of all its users. The app serves as a proof of concept that location-sharing technology can be built with user protection at its core.
My STS research is on the systematic failure of the wearable health device industry to protect the users it claims to empower. I wanted to answer the question: do wearable health device companies exercise their power over user data responsibly? To answer this, I analyzed manufacturers' data policies, major data breaches, existing research on UX design practices, and incidents in which GPS tracking exposed user locations without consent. I applied care ethics as my analytical framework because the relationship between wearable companies and their users is one where users give their health and location data in exchange for a service. My research found that the industry consistently violates this standard: companies employ insecure data infrastructure, design consent mechanisms that obscure, and take advantage of user behavior to set unsafe tracking defaults. A 2025 class action lawsuit against a major manufacturer, in which health data was shared with third-party trackers without user knowledge, solidifies this as a pattern. The conclusion is that the industry has structured itself around data extraction from the start rather than actual user well-being.
Together, my two projects build a meaningful contribution to the broad question of if technology that monitors location or health data can actually be built around user protection. My STS research establishes how the wearable industry has failed to do so and calls for greater regulatory pressure and overall awareness of these priorities. My technical project proposal, Cavalier Cyphers, demonstrates that privacy-first design is architecturally possible through integrating user control into all layers of the system starting from the design process. Future researchers should take the steps towards a functional prototype and explore development alongside UVA Rec, UVA Arts, and the NetBadge authentication team to test if the design holds up in practice. Outside of UVA, it could be adapted for other universities, and researchers should examine whether similar privacy-first principles can scale to real-world large industries.
I would like to sincerely thank Professor Caitlin Wylie, Professor Rosanne Vrugtman, and Professor Upsorn Praphamontripong for their guidance throughout both my STS research and technical proposal. Their oversight and expertise was incredibly valuable and helpful in the writing and research process. Additionally, thank you to the members of UVA's dance community whose experiences provided a very real and personal foundation for my technical project. Finally, thank you to my peers, friends, and family for their encouragement throughout the past four years.
