Gaurav Rathore
His write-ups blend creativity, personal experience, and tailored technical advice, meeting reader needs effectively.
Gaurav Rathore
His write-ups blend creativity, personal experience, and tailored technical advice, meeting reader needs effectively.
It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy – Noam Chomsky
Did you know privacy plays a crucial role in sports? Even sports is not safe from cyberthreats and can cause any team or player numerous quandaries. While some take care of it, some fail to do so.
According to ResearchGate, “more than 70% of surveyed sports organizations had experienced some sort of breach in 2020. Those victims included Manchester United and dozens of popular British football clubs and sport organizations.”
For your better understanding, I’m writing this article, mentioning the privacy factors and how data is changing the game in sports.
There are several factors that are affecting data safety in sports. Major ones are:
Data breaches are the most common threat since the advancement in technology. It can leak sensitive information like contact details, revenue information, or medical records. This can happen because of phishing, hacking or insider threats.
According to CG’s blog post, athletes can suffer damage to their reputation, personal information being spread out, or identity theft. Even fans can be harmed, since most of the teams have their online sites where they sell exclusive item, if you’ve used any such places your content is in there.
Sports organization can face legal consequences, damaged reputations and financial losses which wouldn’t look good and miht loose fan because of it. In the infography below, you can see all the major cyberthreats that occurring in athletic activities.
Sportsmen and fans don’t have full control on their private data. Players often wear tracking gears. This might be the part of their training routing. Athlete health condition and performance is measured this way, and the material collected is used for several things.
Fans on the other hand book tickets and enter baking details which might get recorded, they even agree with terms and cognition, not knowing what they are engaging with. This lacks transparency and further creates trust issues.
If supporters and players have control over this, a sense of security will be created and only those insights will be collected that are important.
It’s quite common gathered statistics is not only made available with the team, coaches or an organization, it is even shared outside. It could be with marketing partner, sponsors or analytic companies.
But why? This help creates personalized experiences or advertisement for targeted audience. Yes, it’s crucial and necessary, but it should be done responsibly. Individuals should be informed that their sensitive information is being used in such places.
Data sharing agreements are important, and it must be stated properly that what will happen f the gathered insights were to misplaced or implemented for any unethical purpose.
There are several ways in which athletic data security can be increased. This includes:
FUN FACTIn 2020 Manchester United’s computer system was attacked by ransomware. However, they managed to solve the issue without paying anything!
Privacy is crucial even in competitive activities, even a little mistake can turn out to brutal. Any sports organization and fans should be precautious with ow they are handling their data. While it’s easy to safeguard sensitive information, people often end up not doing it.
If individual fail to take safety measures they can lose their reputation, private information and game plans which would further impact their in game performance. Limited people should have access to statistics, and whoever it is shared with must report what they have used it for.
