Between more style-friendly wearables and Apple’s effort to integrate personal tracking data with HealthKit, we’ll see a new surge in consumer wearables and personal tracking data in 2015.

In its first year out, the Apple Watch might only be a luxury gadget for early adopters, but careful attention to personal style preferences marks a notable shift in the design of wearables. Withing’s Activité tracker pushes wearable design even further into the classic watch aesthetic to hide tracking outputs to the smartphone interface. And products like Ringly, a connected cocktail ring, hide helpful alerts in a relatively stylish accessory. Wearables have finally become accessories we actually might want to wear.

via 2015: The year wearables finally become wearable, and data more meaningful | BetaBoston.

Those of you unfamiliar with hacker culture might need an explanation of “doxing.”

The word refers to the practice of publishing personal information about people without their consent. Usually it’s things like an address and phone number, but it can also be credit card details, medical information, private e-mails—pretty much anything an assailant can get his hands on.

via 2015: The year “doxing” will hit home | BetaBoston.

One key trend to pay close attention to in 2015 is the so-called “right to be forgotten.”

The concept burst into public consciousness in May when the European Union Court of Justice ruled in the case of a Spanish citizen who sought to have a link to a newspaper article containing unflattering facts about him removed from Google searches of his name. The court ruled that search engines qualified as a data aggregators, which meant that individuals could exert control over the data within them—i.e. search results. To date, almost 200,000 EU citizens have requested Google, Bing and other search engines remove particular links from search results of their names – but critically, only in the EU versions of Google, such as google.es.

via 2015: The year we’ll learn if our ‘right to be forgotten’ transcends international borders | BetaBoston.

Thanks to an unshakable fear that their own gossip-laden e-mails (not to mention business strategies and classified documents) will be leaked to the world, the people of 2015 will finally decide that it may not be a good idea to have a copy of every message you send stored forever online.

A new e-mail tagline will be popularized, stating: “In order to conserve our collective personal and professional reputations, we recommend you permanently delete this email upon reading. Seriously.”

via 2015: The year message encryption will go mainstream | BetaBoston.