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Abstract

With the omnipresent digitalization and quantification of our everyday life, data privacy became an important topic in research, politics and legislation. In order to contain the possible risks of uncontrolled data collection and its pos- sible misuse, it is important to ensure a sustainable data privacy environment. Here, one of the most important aspects is an efficient and effective legislature. In May 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force, the EU made an important step towards improving the European data pri- vacy environment. In this study there are investigated both, the awareness and the perception of the GDPR by the users of fitness tracking technologies. This investigation focuses on people from the EU using a fitness tracking application as well as a fitness tracking device, which usually collect a lot of personal and health-related data. Most of the fitness tracking users are aware of the GDPR but do not believe that it will improve the reality of data privacy. Even though there appears to be limited belief in the sustainability of the European data privacy environment (in terms of a positive development of consumers’ data privacy), this does not necessarily affect the everyday usage of activity tracking applica- tions and wearables.

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