In the French Alps, the weekend ritual is as predictable as the weather isn’t. You see the same choreography at trailheads and lift queues: people tightening boots, checking bindings, shouldering packs, and doing the quiet mental arithmetic of risk. Ropes. Layers. Food. A headtorch “just in case”. And increasingly, a small constellation of electronics that promise to make the mountain feel a little more knowable.

A watch that tracks altitude and heart rate. A phone full of offline maps. A satellite messenger clipped to a strap. A beacon, dormant until the worst day of someone’s life. These devices are sold as safety, and often they are. But they also represent something else—something we don’t tend to think about in the cold wind, with gloves on and a ridge line ahead.

They’re computers. Networked computers. And the mountain doesn’t make them less hackable.

Mountain sports have followed the trajectory of everything else: once you can measure something, you start optimising it. Ski boots and bike frames are now technology platforms as much as they are equipment. Wearables have moved from novelty to expectation, feeding the modern appetite for performance metrics and proof—proof that you were there, proof that you moved, proof that you improved. Even events that used to be deliberately “offline” now come with live tracking. The CEO of one of my clients runs an annual multi-day cross-mountain event in the Alps where progress is tracked online, stage by stage, as if endurance has become a broadcast product.

It’s impressive. It’s also quietly risky.

The first and most obvious problem is that connected devices create entry points. Not necessarily for Hollywood-style “hacking the avalanche beacon” sabotage, but for the far more common failures of modern systems: leaky data, weak authentication, sloppy cloud integrations, and a messy supply chain of apps and third-party services that collect more than users realise. For years, product security conversations in outdoor tech have focused on cloud connectivity for exactly this reason. The device is rarely the only system. It’s an edge node that streams data back to a platform, where the interesting analytics—and the interesting exposure—tend to live.

Then there’s the class of risks that feel niche until they aren’t. GPS spoofing is real. It’s rare, and it’s not the kind of thing a casual criminal does from a café. But if someone is motivated and has the right kit, it is possible to mislead GPS receivers. In an urban environment, the consequence might be minor. On a mountain, wrong information can become wrong decisions. And wrong decisions, in marginal conditions, are how accidents begin.

Wearables add a different kind of fragility. They’re sold as insight—heart rate, recovery, SpO2, stress scores, warnings when something looks off. They’re also data exhaust. Location trails, physiological signatures, behavioural patterns. If that data is misused, leaked, or misinterpreted, the harm isn’t only privacy-deep. It can become operational. You can imagine the obvious: a stalker using location traces. You can also imagine the subtle: people making poor calls based on a device that is wrong, or on data that has been altered, corrupted, or simply inferred badly by an algorithm that’s overconfident in thin air.

And the uncomfortable truth is that this isn’t hypothetical. We’ve seen what happens when fitness and location data gets aggregated at scale and presented as “insight”.

Strava learned that the hard way when a global heat map visualisation, built from “anonymised” activity data, ended up highlighting patterns in places that weren’t meant to have patterns at all. The story stuck because it showed something a lot of people still don’t intuit: anonymity is fragile when location and routine are involved, and aggregation can reveal what individual data points hide.

MyFitnessPal was another reminder, for a different reason. When a large consumer fitness platform leaks account data, it isn’t just “people need to change their passwords”. It’s the demonstration effect. Big datasets are targets because they’re valuable, and once compromised they tend to cascade across other accounts, other services, other parts of people’s lives. Fitness and lifestyle platforms are often treated as low-risk. Attackers rarely agree.

So what does “good” look like, if you care about security and privacy in outdoor tech without turning every purchase into a research project?

It starts with a mindset shift. Don’t treat mountain tech as “gear”. Treat it as an ecosystem: a device, a phone app, a cloud platform, and a set of policies and defaults that determine what gets collected, how it gets stored, and who it can be shared with. The mountain doesn’t change those fundamentals—it just raises the consequence of getting them wrong.

Manufacturers have improved in recent years, partly because regulation and scrutiny have increased, and partly because connected products are now expected to have a basic security posture. Encryption in transit and at rest should be table stakes. Secure development practices should be visible in the way products are updated and supported over time. Responsible disclosure should be a normal pathway, not an adversarial standoff when researchers report issues. And long-term software support matters more than most buyers realise, because the device you buy for safety doesn’t stop needing security fixes once the marketing cycle moves on.

User behaviour still matters, too, because the weakest link in most systems remains the same one it has always been: people, under time pressure, clicking “allow”. Keep firmware and apps updated. Be sceptical of always-on sharing, especially default public profiles. Understand what “tracking” features broadcast by default, and what you can disable without breaking the device’s core safety function. If a product relies on an account, use a strong, unique password and enable multi-factor authentication when it’s available.

Most importantly, don’t confuse technology with a plan. Even the best electronics can fail, and not always due to malice. Batteries die. Screens crack. Cold weather behaves like a denial-of-service attack on lithium. Connectivity disappears exactly where you’d like it most. If a device stops working, you still need to be able to get yourself home safely. In mountain sports, the backup plan isn’t paranoia; it’s competence.

The modern summit is increasingly digital. That’s not inherently a problem. But it does mean the risk model has expanded. The silent threats aren’t only storms and slips anymore. They’re also the invisible seams between hardware, software, and the cloud—seams that were never designed with your safety as the primary requirement.

The mountain is still real. Your tech should be, too.