Wearables haven’t made quite the splash some people thought they would. Not quite yet anyway, but there are a lot of people out there wearing smartwatches—I used to be one of them!
These devices offer many potential health benefits, have lots of neat and truly useful features, and can give you insight into your own lifestyle and body that would otherwise be impossible for the average person to track—but for me they do raise some serious privacy concerns.
More Than Just Steps and Heartbeats
Modern smartwatches do way more than just count your steps and measure your heart rate. These devices are absolutely packed with sensors. Honestly, from a technology perspective, they’re pretty miraculous.
They can measure your blood oxygen level, sleep cycles, stress, skin temperature, movement, and, of course, don’t forget about things like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. Not every smartwatch has every possible sensor, but all of them collect a wealth of information.
Now, that’s not a problem by itself. The two big questions are whether that information is potentially sensitive (making it important to protect) and where and how it gets shared. A 2024 NIH study notes that
Previously, patient data were only collected after diagnosis or during physician visits. Now, smartwatches collect data from both healthy and unhealthy individuals, providing unprecedented insights into disease and health maintenance. However, this area also raises significant data privacy and ethical concerns.
It points out that the data collected could absolutely be sensitive in nature, and that smartwatch users don’t have much control over what happens with that data. So, in principle, there are privacy issues around smartwatches that are unresolved.
A survey published in 2025 notes “the distinctive characteristics of wearable technologies introduce unique security and privacy challenges, including the potential for unauthorized access to sensitive location, medical, and physiological data.”
Data Sharing You Don’t See
One of the issues is that the data collected by your watch doesn’t just stay on-device, or move no further than your connected phone. It’s probably being automatically backed up to the cloud, which is prosomething may not have explicitly been aware of. Perhaps because it’s hidden in a sea of legalese. Once that data is in the cloud and in the hands of your platform provider, what happens to it? What sorts of permissions did you agree to?
One big issue is that much of the health data collected by smartwatches falls outside protections like HIPAA, which mainly covers healthcare providers, and though some states have privacy laws, there is no comprehensive federal protection specifically for wearable data.
A study supported by Mozilla shows that laws have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to protecting the data your smartwatch collects about you, and also does a great job of outlining specifically how this data could be used to harm you. Data that doesn’t fall within the protection of laws like HIPAA could potentially be sold to third-party buyers, and that’s concerning in my book!
Location and Movement Tracking
It might feel like a moot point considering it applies to the smartphone you’re carrying around, but a typical smartwatch has the technology onboard to track and log your movements. Even without GPS, a watch can take note of what Bluetooth or Wi-Fi devices you are in range of, and this data can be used to reconstruct someone’s movement.
This is also the sort of information a court can legally extract, as was the case when a man was convicted of murdering his wife based on movement data from her Fitbit (as reported by CNN). I’m not objecting to the role the watch data played in the interest of justice, but that the monitoring of your movement by your smartwatch for later analysis isn’t theoretical, it’s already happened.
The Hidden Business Model of Wearables
As an article from Brown University points out, “personal health data can be sold to advertisers or used for other purposes without the individual’s knowledge or consent.”
Data is valuable, but data can be de-anonymized in some cases, and there’s also the risk of data breaches. Even if the primary platform has great protections in place, that doesn’t mean every third-party that buys the data can claim the same. As long as the companies that collect this data have some way to make money from the data itself, that’s a perverse incentive I think will push towards shoddier data protection. Unless laws get with the times and prescribe much stricter regulations where our health data is sold on the data broker market, whether in aggregate or not.
What You Can Do About It
In my case, I’ve decided that smartwatches are just not for me. Apart from the fact that I don’t enjoy wearing them, and the notifications give me more anxiety and focus-breaking interruptions than utility, I already feel I have my hands full managing the privacy issues on my smartphone. A device I can’t actually live without.
However, if you do want to keep wearing a smartwatch, you need to review the agreements you’ve signed as they relate to your personal health data, and data like your location and movements. You should also limit what access apps have to that data to just what’s necessary for your needs.
Be careful when linking different platforms to your smartwatch, especially since you may accidentally let your watch auto-post your activity to a public feed.
Most importantly, read the data sharing agreement you’re asked to sign before using a smartwatch, and if you don’t agree with it, put the watch back in its box and get a refund.
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