Fitness Geeks, here are some tips to keep your fitness apps more secure

It is evident today that technology has made living facile, comfortable, and reduce workload. From communicating, shopping, studying, to even taking care of our health. Technology has definitely made it a lot easier for us to conduct our daily tasks.

Fitness Geeks, here are some tips to keep your fitness apps more secure

Fitness apps are becoming quite popular with smartphone users, as people turn to these apps to help them monitor indicators of their health and physical activity. That, and the way fashion companies and movie makers present human bodies, is the main reason that people want to have a better, well-chiseled body. Therefore, the use of free fitness apps has sky-rocketed. But their privacy and security settings are still stuck behind the starting line and has a long way to go.

These apps are originally created to record everything from your geographic location to sleep patterns, calories consumed, heart rate, and much more. This of course help users to keep track for their health and diet habits, but imagine how these information are beneficial it actually is for advertisers and insurance companies. Let’s find out how exactly these apps can affect your life.

• Privacy:

Why would anyone offer you a service that costs an arm and a leg for free? Simply because they know that they will get something much valuable from you: Your personal data.

Fitness apps require a lot of funding and resources to create and maintain the apps, that’s why they always tend to tie up with healthcare and insurance firms. In return, these healthcare and insurance firms demand them to share your personal data.

• Unsecure transmission:

If you think that sharing your personal data with healthcare and insurance firms is a bad thing, it’s about to get worse! If the data is shared as plain text or un-encrypted, then anyone can have access to it.

• Security breach:

Here’s where things go from scary to downright terrifying, there is a major hole in fitness apps’ online security. A simple malicious user can gain command over it and use to steal all kinds of personal data, depending on the permissions the user has granted the app.

So how to protect your fitness apps’ online security?

VPN.Express stands side by side with all users requiring tech companies to include better privacy settings in their apps. Therefore, we have compiled a list of tips to help improve your privacy while getting your work out on.

• Make sure your apps use HTTPS:

What you need to know is that while almost every fitness app uses Wi-Fi to share data, not all of them do so on a secure server. Always look for HTTPS in the address bar. While you can see this as a simple and old precaution, you will be chocked by the number of popular apps that fail to do so.  If your apps are not using HTTPS, it’s definitely time to look for new ones.

• Make sure your fitness app have access to basic data only:

It’s perfectly ok to share how many steps you took during breakfast, but sharing your irregular bowl movements after that breakfast is definitely way, way too far. It’s a simple equation, the less you share with your fitness application, the more safe and secure you will be. So, only stick to the basic settings, and restrict access to data you don’t think the app needs.

• Use a VPN:

By boosting your device’s online security you will automatically boost your fitness apps’ security as well, all you need is to use a VPN service.

VPNs such as VPN.Express offer you the best services to hide your identity, location, and guarantee full encryption to all the information shared by your device, which prevents your personal data from being stolen by anyone.

No one can deny that Fitness apps offer a great help when it comes to taking care of your health. You don’t have to avoid using them, as long as you do so with caution.

Be safe. Be healthy. Be free.