talkingDigital

Have you been sleeping well? How many hours did you get last night?

READ COLUMN AS IT APPEARED IN THE BEACON

Do you get up and walk around at least once an hour?

Do you feel awkward reading a text message when your phone goes off in a meeting?

Do you fumble around with your media player when you should be paying attention to what you’re doing?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that more people are wearing bulky electronic bracelets or funky, digital watch-like devices. These are called fitness trackers and they monitor how many steps you’ve taken or when you’ve been sitting too long. They may even display your heart rate or tell you how well you sleep. Some fitness trackers even control your music player.

Whether you are a fitness junkie or a couch potato, you may be interested in what a fitness tracker can do for you.

What to look for

The best fitness trackers connect wirelessly to an app on your smartphone that tracks and provides real-time reports on your activity.

Cheap trackers (under $100) generally provide basic activity monitoring, such as step counts and sleep patterns. More expensive trackers add features such as a watch, heart rate monitor and GPS. Some devices also track types of activity, laps and calorie counts.

Most devices will vibrate when you are getting a text message or phone call. Some are equipped with screens that display caller information or a summary of the text message.

The top three brands

There are dozens of fitness trackers on the market, but only three major brands tend to dominate the positive user reviews: Fitbit, Garmin and Apple.

• The Apple Watch is no ordinary fitness tracker. It allows you to install apps, make phone calls and control your iPhone, but it offers enough health monitoring features to make it a serious—although expensive—fitness tracker. The latest basic model costs around $300, but they go up to $10,000 (seriously).

• Fitbit and Garmin make a number of affordable trackers. Read reviews before making a purchase. Essentially, the more you spend, the more features you get, but the accuracy of the data is about the same across all devices.

Connect other apps

You may want to consider a fitness tracker that you can connect with other apps through your smartphone.

• MyFitnessPal is an app that lets you track your diet. If you want an extra 200 calories in your diet, your fitness tracker will report your walk or jog data and update your calorie budget in real time.

• Endomondo is an app that allows you to record your movement-based activity—runs, bike rides, swims, etc. It tracks laps and distance, and gives you real-time, audible updates through your headphones.

• Runkeeper records historical
and real-time data about your runs. It’s specifically designed for those interested in improving their running skills.

Privacy is a major concern these days because so much of who you are is now kept in digital form, and then spread all over the world because of internet access. So even though so much more is convenient and available for you, without the right security measures, all of that information is available to other people as well who get access.

So, a big solution to that problem is to make sure that your digital presence is encrypted as much as possible, and you can do that by encrypting your email, your passwords, your financial data, your phone messages, and by protecting your mobile data as well.

Encrypting Your Email

Though most people don’t think that a majority of their email is any kind of a security risk, there are still times when you communicate when privacy is necessary. Sending medical data, financial data, or even relationship talk doesn’t always need to be publicly searchable or readable. So, to that end, consider using an e-mail encryption program that does the hard work for you, without you even having to think about it, so that all of that information is sent entirely privately.

Encrypting Your Passwords

Passwords are the keys to your most personal and most important data, so it’s no surprise that the best password managers are the ones that encrypt those passwords locally so that, even though you only need your one master password, the rest of them are safely locked away in a format that hackers can’t get to. That is one of the best safety features that you can put in place on your home computers.

Encrypting Your Financial Data

Most of your financial data is going to be encrypted by your banks and credit card companies automatically. Since the very beginning of internet technology, financial institutions realized how important that kind of safety was, so they have been using military-grade encryption practices pretty much since people started being able to use electronic banking.

Encrypting Your Phone Messages

Phone messages can be a source of privacy issues as well. This is why certain phone apps give you the option to encrypt them. This means that any links, texts, photos, or attachments that you send are run through a system so that anything that’s intercepted can’t be read or looked at.

Protecting Your Mobile Data

And though it’s not necessarily encryption, protecting your data on your mobile devices falls into the same category of privacy and safety. You can set your devices up with a password, and if someone fails a certain number of times, all of your data will be erased, which means that no one can access it after a failed hack attempt.

Have you been sleeping well? How many hours did you get last night?

READ COLUMN AS IT APPEARED IN THE BEACON

Do you get up and walk around at least once an hour?

Do you feel awkward reading a text message when your phone goes off in a meeting?

Do you fumble around with your media player when you should be paying attention to what you’re doing?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that more people are wearing bulky electronic bracelets or funky, digital watch-like devices. These are called fitness trackers and they monitor how many steps you’ve taken or when you’ve been sitting too long. They may even display your heart rate or tell you how well you sleep. Some fitness trackers even control your music player.

Whether you are a fitness junkie or a couch potato, you may be interested in what a fitness tracker can do for you.

What to look for

The best fitness trackers connect wirelessly to an app on your smartphone that tracks and provides real-time reports on your activity.

Cheap trackers (under $100) generally provide basic activity monitoring, such as step counts and sleep patterns. More expensive trackers add features such as a watch, heart rate monitor and GPS. Some devices also track types of activity, laps and calorie counts.

Most devices will vibrate when you are getting a text message or phone call. Some are equipped with screens that display caller information or a summary of the text message.

The top three brands

There are dozens of fitness trackers on the market, but only three major brands tend to dominate the positive user reviews: Fitbit, Garmin and Apple.

• The Apple Watch is no ordinary fitness tracker. It allows you to install apps, make phone calls and control your iPhone, but it offers enough health monitoring features to make it a serious—although expensive—fitness tracker. The latest basic model costs around $300, but they go up to $10,000 (seriously).

• Fitbit and Garmin make a number of affordable trackers. Read reviews before making a purchase. Essentially, the more you spend, the more features you get, but the accuracy of the data is about the same across all devices.

Connect other apps

You may want to consider a fitness tracker that you can connect with other apps through your smartphone.

• MyFitnessPal is an app that lets you track your diet. If you want an extra 200 calories in your diet, your fitness tracker will report your walk or jog data and update your calorie budget in real time.

• Endomondo is an app that allows you to record your movement-based activity—runs, bike rides, swims, etc. It tracks laps and distance and gives you real-time, audible updates through your headphones.

• Runkeeper records historical
and real-time data about your runs. It’s specifically designed for those interested in improving their running skills.