Wearable Health Data Lacks Privacy Protections

An Electronic Frontier Foundation review of ten major wearable platforms found that most provide limited public transparency about government data requests and do not offer end-to-end encryption for stored health data.

Apple was the only reviewed provider identified as supporting end-to-end encryption for Apple Health data under specified settings, while Apple and Google publish transparency reports and several companies describe or plan user-notification policies. The findings matter because wearables collect sensitive location, movement, sleep, and biometric data that may remain readable by providers and could be disclosed in legal or investigative proceedings.