Nike+iPod = Big Brother?

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Monday, 04 December 2006

Page 2 of 2

Nike and Apple will likely have to come up with some kind of better security model for the transmission of data so that only an authorized and paired iPod can pick up and decipher the signal. For now that is clearly not the case.

What this whole episode should signal is that people do not like being tracked, and if they have these kinds of capabilities on hand, only they want to be able to track themselves, with a way of securing the system so no-one else is able to get at their data.

A public debate has now begun into the whole affair, with some raising the whole RFID debate once more, which has the potential of being used and misused in the same way.

Any company that has similar plans in mind will no doubt be wanting to make sure they cannot be publicly exposed as not necessarily taking security seriously as seems to be the case with Nike+iPod, even though on the face of it they never thought this would be an issue.

The best advice for Nike+iPod users right now seems to be to manually turn off the sensor when you’re not using it. Alternative technologies that effectively do the same thing include a recently released Sony Walkman and the Nokia 5500 Sport mobile phone. As these devices have a pedometer and other sports sensors within them, they are not having to broadcast or receive signals from Nike shoes, and indeed work with any shoes you currently own.

Perhaps now they’ll get a sales boost!
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