Blog 17: Tracking and Uncertainty

Onto the next two chapters in Self-Tracking, we bring more attention to how these tracking devices are used. In particular, chapter 3 covers the different types of usage that tracking devices commonly find themselves in.

Ranging from evaluating some kind of progress to giving a visual meaning through the results, tracking seems to have garnered a lot more variety in usage than originally intended. I think that the book’s point about how tracking data results show more than what’s initially intended is very true in this respect, and I can’t help but wonder if there are situations if tracking can reveal something that one didn’t want to know about - per se, revealing too much information.

For example, let’s say a person is tracking their diet to make sure they only eat a proper amount of junk food so that they can continue to have a healthy lifestyle. After time though, the tracking device comes to reveal that the person has another unrelated but still important problem - they’re at risk of heart disease because of how much red meat they consume. Now the person has become overly conscious of what kinds of foods they eat in general so as to avoid future health issues. Things like the salmonella outbreaks that’ve occurred in various food products in the recent decade, or the importance of eating fish due to their high levels of omega 3. Though it can be argued that learning such information is ultimately a good thing, as it teaches people that there’s more to a healthy diet than just avoiding having too much sugar/fats, I can’t help but wonder if there are situations where learning so much info could lead to a negative outcome. If I may continue the example, learning about all of this could lead the person to be so worried about their diet that it starts interfering from their regular activities. Just a thought.

Questions:

• Have you ever had a situation like this before? How did you react?
• Many health related things are tracked as soon as you’re born, and so far have yielded consistently accurate results custom built to the person in question. As such, could the inaccuracies that over-the-counter tracking devices have currently be resolved by using a similar tactic?

Image from: http://www.eloisegratton.com/blog/2014/12/20/health-tracking-bracelets-and-privacy-issues/