Wearables did not make the splash that some people thought they would. Not entirely yet, but there are many people who wear smartwatches – I used to be one of them!
These devices offer many potential health benefits, have many neat and really useful functions and can give you insight into your own lifestyle and body that would otherwise be impossible for the average person to follow – but for me they arouse some serious privacy problems.
More than just steps and heartbeats
Modern smartwatches do much more than just counting your steps and measuring your heart rate. These devices are absolutely full of sensors. To be honest, from a technology perspective, they are pretty wonderful.
They can do your oxygen level of the blood, sleep cycles, stress, skin temperature, movement, movement, and, of course, don’t forget about things like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. Not every smartwatch has every possible sensor, but they all collect a wealth of information.
That is not a problem in itself. The two big questions are whether that information may be sensitive (making it important to protect) and where and how it is shared. A 2024 NIH study notes that on
Previously, patient data was only collected after diagnosis or during doctors visits. Now smartwatches collect data from both healthy and unhealthy individuals, which provides unprecedented insights in illness and health maintenance. However, this area also evokes significant data privacy and ethical care.
It indicates that the data collected can be absolutely sensitive in nature and that Smartwatch users do not have much control over what happens to that data. So in principle there are privacy problems around smartwatches that have not been resolved.
A Survey published in 2025 notes “The distinctive characteristics of portable technologies introduce unique security and privacy challenges, including the potential for unauthorized access to sensitive location, medical and physiological data.”
Share data that you don’t see
One of the problems is that the data collected by your watch will not only stay on devices or do not go beyond your connected telephone. It is probably automatically supported by the cloud, which is Prosomething, may not be explicitly informed. Perhaps because it is 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 kind of permissions did you agree with?
A major problem is that much of the health data collected by smartwatches is not included in protection, such as hipaa, which mainly relates to healthcare providers, and although some states have privacy laws, there is no extensive federal protection specifically for portable data.
A Study supported by Mozilla Show that laws have a lot to do when it comes to protecting the data that your smartwatch collects about you, and also does great work to specifically outline how this data can be used to harm you. Data that does not fall under the protection of the laws, such as hipaa, may be sold to external buyers, and that is relating to my book!
Location and movements
It can feel like a dispute, since it applies to the smartphone that you take with you, but a typical smartwatch has the technology on board to follow and log your movements. Even without GPS, a watch can note which Bluetooth or Wi-Fi devices you are, and this data can be used to reconstruct someone’s movement.
This is also the type of information that a court can legally extract, as was the case when a man was convicted of killing his wife on the basis of movement data of her Fitbit (as reported by CNN). I have no objection to the role that the watch data has played in the interest of justice, but that monitoring your movement by your smartwatch for later analysis is not theoretically, it has already happened.
The Hidden Operations Model of Wearables
As one Article by Brown University points out, “Personal health data can be sold to advertisers or are used for other purposes without the knowledge or permission of the individual.”
Data is valuable, but data can be made anonymous in some cases and there is also the risk of data breaches. Even if the primary platform has great protection, this does not mean that every third parties buying the data can claim the same thing. As long as the companies that collect this data have a way to make money from the data itself, that is a perverse stimulans that I think will push to Shoddier data protection. Unless laws reach the times and prescribe much stricter regulations in which our health data is sold on the Datamakelaarmarkt, whether or not in total.
What you can do about it
In my case I decided that smartwatches are just not for me. Apart from the fact that I don’t like to wear them, and the reports give me more fear and focus -breaking interruptions than usefulness, I already have the feeling that I have my hands fully to manage the privacy problems on my smartphone. A device that I can’t really live without.
However, if you want to continue to wear a smartwatch, you must view the agreements that you have signed if they relate to your personal health data and data such as your location and movements. You must also limit which access apps have to that data to exactly what is needed for your needs.
Be careful when linking different platforms to your smartwatch, especially because you can accidentally have your watch automatically posted your activity to a public feed.
The most important thing is that read The agreement for sharing data you are asked to sign before using a smartwatch, and if you do not agree, place the watch back in the box and receive a refund.
#smartwatch #spies