Promise of absolute privacy

How will SolFit guarentee privacy to their users?

A main concern that people expressed when we surveyed interest in the SolFit application, was that of privacy. All contemporary fitness applications use GPS in order to track a user's activity when going for a walk or a run. This provides the user with extensive insights about the quality of their run.

However, at SolFit, we want to do things differently. To us, the initial importance is not as much the quality of the run, rather that the user IS going on a run. Being physically active should not necessarily be performance-focused, rather used as a way for people to stay fit. Also keeping in mind the concern of privacy, we decided to only track the step count of the user at SolFit. This way, no personal details or potential privacy-compromising details will be collected. GPS can be used for example to track a user's whereabouts, and we did not want this. We wanted true privacy and anonymity for our users.

Additionally, we are currently exploring further extensions to our application. Right now, we can only truly claim privacy when only counting steps and therefore monitoring a walk or a run. Tracking bodily signals through for example a wearable device is interesting, but once again an invasion of privacy for the user. Consequently, the SolFit team is currently brainstorming on a way of adding different exercise activities to the application while also honoring our promise of absolute user privacy.