Data Privacy concerns for Smart Watches

Abstract

Indian customers and customers across the world are not aware about the potential pitfalls of freely sharing the digital data. Personally Identifiable Information can be used to profile the user and hence, can be exploited in ways unthinkable. However, the customers have resigned to data privacy either to the brand name or lack of awareness. Smart Watch is the modern-day gadget that collects and shares the critical data related to health parameters of users.Customers don’t consider privacy policy of the firm as the buying decision criteria. The price sensitive behaviour of Indian customers paves the way for opportunism by brands where data can be extracted by providing better service and enhanced customer experience. The customers have also demonstrated a switching behaviour from privacy resigned to privacy pragmatic if the potential exploitations of digital data are brought to the surface. Privacy becomes a concern and buying decision criteria changes. Privacy concerns have been gender and age neutral for smart watches because of the criticality of the health data. The buyers become willing to pay a premium for enhanced data privacy and are not willing to share the data even for heavy price discounts. Brand name acts as credibility enhancer and hence, the marketing strategy shall be to become privacy pragmatic. Recognizing a brand as privacy pragmatic has been the criteria to restore the consumer trust. Whether there is trust, there is a way to extract the data with the informed consent of the users.