Data collection in Australian sport leading to privacy issues for athletes

Professional sports in Australia have been taken hostage by the promise of dollars that data can bring, leading to an «explosion in the capture» of athletes' personal and private information collected from 24-7 monitoring with little to no regulations or safeguards.

The «capture all» approach without the application of a legal, ethical and medical framework leaves athletes and governing bodies exposed and vulnerable according to the authors of a new discussion paper urging action from professional sports bodies.

Getting Ahead of the Game – Athlete Data in Professional Spor, has been published by the University of Western Australia's (UWA) Minderoo Tech and Policy Lab and the Australian Academy of Science.

An expert working group (EWG) found sports currently harvest vast amounts of data that cuts across rights of privacy, bodily autonomy, worker protections and human rights.

Co-chair of the group Professor Julia Powles said the amount of information collection is prolific.

«There's information from the chest harnesses that athletes wear, there's information from devices that we might use for our weekend run … but there's also information collection when they're off the field – wellbeing tracking, sleep track, a range of physiological measures,» she told The Ticket podcast.

«So, it's 24/7 information collection, and the spectacular thing is that this is in an industry where that information collection is largely unregulated.

»That's happening on laptops, phones, on management systems where no-one quite knows where the information is going.

«There's a huge number of parties touching that information to the extent where no practitioner we spoke to could really comprehend the scale of information collection.»

Nobody interviewed by the