Oura Rings, Garmin GPS fitness watches, Apple Watches, Whoop bands—every year, more and more tech devices are promising to monitor our health and fitness, guide us toward healthier living, and provide useful health metrics to take to our doctors. But few of these tools provide the sorts of privacy and security promises we demand from all technology, let alone tech that captures personal health data.

Oura Rings, Garmin GPS fitness watches, Apple Watches, Whoop bands—every year, more and more tech devices are promising to monitor our health and fitness, guide us toward healthier living, and provide useful health metrics to take to our doctors. But few of these tools provide the sorts of privacy and security promises we demand from all technology, let alone tech that captures personal health data. It’s time they step up and start providing transparency reports and stronger encryption options. Surveys suggest that around 40 percent of people in the United States own some sort of commercially available wearable health device. Despite being marketed as health devices, they have no special health-related privacy protections that one might hope for. The companies who make these devices can and do collect an abundance of data, and many of them share that data with third-parties for marketing or to influence insurance rates, or use it for their own purposes, like training artificial intelligence models. Health data is increasingly an important part of law enforcement or government investigations. Wearable data has been critical in a number of cases, where information about heart rate and steps was used to determine the whereabouts of individuals. And the surveillance company Penlink calls fitness trackers and wearables an “overlooked source” for law enforcement since they tend to show movement patterns and changes in heart rates. Law enforcement can try to get access[…]

    • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      Now featuring Garmin if you want good hardware with excellent battery life. Add in self-hosted Endurain and it’s pretty much good enough offline unless you’re actually a semi-professional athlete or above.

      • lemmysmash@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        Oh, Endurain is cool, I didn’t know about it, thanks! I don’t need it though (lol), but it’s cool.

        I have a few Garmin devices used exclusively with Gadgetbridge and pretty happy about it. Early implementation had quite some bugs, but current one is much more stable and polished. There are still issues and limitations, e.g. custom watchfaces installed from their store refuse to work after X days without connection to the official app (manually installed .prg files work fine), but overall I’m not going back to official apps already.

  • unitedwithme@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3·
    8 days ago

    Honestly, I got a Nothing Watch CMF3, and it has more connected requirements that my old cheap AmazeFit watch brand. Plus, with Flock and others possibly Using SignalWatch for BT device scanning, I quit wearing it pretty much always. I honestly don’t need to know calorie count or steps, it’s not that important…

    At most, I put it on before bed to track sleeping and remove in the morning before my shower. Now I use GadgetBridge to review any data, not the Nothing app.