This appeared last week:
Athletes face explosive data intrusions that could impact amateur sport
7:30AM April 13, 2022
An expert panel wants to reign in the exponentially expanding personal data being collected about professional athletes. It not only includes the performance of athlete’s bodies during competition and training, but also the intimacies of mental health, sleep quality, food intake and even possibly menstruation data.
The expert working group has been convened by the Australian Academy of Science and the University of Western Australia’s Minderoo Tech and Policy lab. It wants to start a national conversation on what data is appropriate for aiding athletic performance, and what constitutes an invasion of privacy.
Its discussion paper says the growth in personal information collected about Australian professional athletes has outpaced the scientifically proven benefit to players, with the number of parties interested in this information, especially commercial parties, dramatically shifting the risk vs. reward ratio against the athletes.
Co-chair Associate Professor Julia Powles from the UWA said the trickle down of almost routine data collection practices from professional to amateur sport and schools posed an even wider privacy risk.
“These athletes have been wearing chess harnesses for nearly a decade. There’s huge amounts of data streaming literally off their backs. They‘ve got all kinds of devices. It is definitely a sector where you get a trickle down. It has tremendous cultural importance. And I think the remarkable part of our report is it’s really not that useful.”
She said that as well as widespread tracking, there was the accumulation of athletes’ data in cloud storage.
Assoc Prof Powles said cloud services accumulated highly sensitive data 24 hours around the clock, yet practitioners could not tell you where the data was kept.
“Athlete data collection is almost completely unregulated, leaving it open to serious risks including privacy and security breaches, commercial exploitation, and misuse that impacts on careers and livelihoods,” she said.
Former Olympic swimmer and expert working group member Rachel Harris said the information shared about female athletes could be incredibly sensitive. “It could be things like fertility, or my plans for wanting to have a child in the future. Is divulging that kind of information going to impact my ability to be selected on a specific team?,” Dr Harris said.
“Does a coach, strength and conditioning practitioner or physiologist need to know that an athlete has got breast tenderness? Information such as pelvic floor and urinary incontinence: do we need to be sharing that kind of information with a number of different role holders?”
Lots More here:
You can read more here about the Minderoo Policy Lab:
There is more detailed discussion here:
Clearly this is the beginning, rather than the end, of a serious discussion as this sort of monitoring becomes more pervasive and where, almost unthinkingly, private personal date is captured and used without protections – in an environment where performance is so highly valued.
Definitely one to keep an eye on. Sensible regulation is probably needed!
David.
A classic failure of logic:
ReplyDeleteSome data is good, so lets get more of it; lots more; the more the better; all of it.
Now we've got all of it, what shall we do with it? Anybody got any ideas? Anybody? Anything?
Now it's costing us a fortune to collect and manage, what do we do? I know let's sell it.
Who wants it? I'm sure someone will pay for it.