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. Law enforcement can try to get access to this data through subpoenas or warrants.
Only two of the companies surveyed, Apple and Google (which also owns Fitbit), currently publish transparency reports. Apple, Google, and Whoop promise to notify users of law enforcement requests in publicly available documentation. Oura now does too, after an update to their privacy policy in June 2026.
Support for end-to-end encryption is even more rare than transparency reports. The Apple Watch, at least with data stored in the Health app, is the only popular fitness wearable that supports end-to-end encryption by default. No other popular consumer health wearable—not Google, not Garmin, not Oura—offers end-to-end encryption for the data it collects and stores online.
Health data is some of the most personal data we produce, and most wearables companies are behind the times when it comes to basic privacy practices and transparency. At the bare minimum, companies need to publish transparency reports detailing how often they receive requests from law enforcement and commit to notifying users whenever that happens.
This article was originally published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Republished under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. Read the original article: https://eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/most-smart-watches-rings-and-bands-lack-basic-transparency-reports-and-key-privacy.
