Users’ responses to privacy issues with the connected information ecologies created by fitness trackers

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. With increased innovation and adoption of digital technologies in our everyday life for various purposes, media, privacy experts, advocates, scholars and researchers have noted and raised privacy and security concerns associated with the misuse of personal information from digital technologies. These technologies enable collection, processing and re-purposing of personal information for various purposes by commercial and interested entities. This paper presents a privacy awareness perspective in an attempt to understand how people respond to privacy concerns while using activity tracking devices and applications, loyalty cards and related data sharing within various information ecologies. The research used a constructivist paradigm; we interviewed twenty-one users of activity trackers and loyalty cards to understand their privacy practices. Results show that privacy is a flexible concept which is a result of users’ negotiation between the benefits and the harms of disclosing personal information