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Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Ok, are there any wearables left that can be trusted with personal data? I want to use it to track my own activity/heartrate, not to be used and tracked by somebody else for their shady purposes.

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What are you afraid of? I would be more worried about the data in your phone. There is more damage to be made with GPS location and all the other private data.

I doubt that knowing what time you sleep, when you exercise, and your hearth rate can add a lot more risks. Maybe the hearth rate combined with what you are doing on your phone can be used to measure the effect of what you are reading or watching...

Well, this data would been incredibly valuable to insurance companies. If you could tie specific demographic information (which Google has mastered) to sleep and exercise routines, this could be used in a risk model.

I'm fairly confident this will eventually happen, as I had a professor explain to me that he wears a fitness tracker in exchange for a premium reduction. I think the incentive of the insurance company is that they found individuals wearing these devices to be more conscientious of their own health (I don't think they request any data at this point).

Even if you don't partake, these risk models will certainly generalize your demographic to their set of data.

From the Ad-revenue perspective, it's easy to see how they could target you for selling melatonin if your sleep pattern supports it. Or, maybe you're active, which brings about plenty of products to target you for.

My first thought about this headline was the data collection. You don't use the internet when you're out being active!

This is one of my least favourite things about my Fitbit Charge 2. If I want to see previous days' data, or anything more than steps walked/stairs climbed, then I have to sync my watch with the Fitbit servers.

Even if my watch is connected to my phone, if my phone isn't connected to the internet, I can't get the data off of it!

There is an open source android app called Gadget Bridge which supports a bunch of wearable devices and doesn't phone home to the OEMs servers. I have been using that on my pebble watch for years now.

Personally I’m using a Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 4 on iOS 13 with an open source on device firewall. That way I can still use the official Apps like MiFit or AmazFit to sync all data to Apple Health without it being uploaded from their App to elsewhere. Make sure to use iOS12 or upwards and you’ll have to enable 2 Factor Authentication in order for your Apple Health data to be end to end encrypted.

I’m not sure how Android holds up but it should be possible to achieve something similar there, I’d guess. On Android there are third party Apps for syncing which should make things easier.

Pros: * Mi Band 4 is very cheap * Reliable HR, steps, activity & sleep tracking * Easy and quick setup * > 20 days battery life * Custumizable watch faces * 5ATM water resistant

Cons: * Xiaomi and Huami are Chinese companies * No always on display (but raising watch turns on display) * Some data could leak should the firewall fail * Currently no third party Apps for syncing to iOS

I wrote a short article about using the Mi Band 4 on iOS with a focus on privacy on my website if you’d like to know a bit more.

It's not out yet, but a Pine watch ("PineTime") has been announced: https://www.pine64.org/2019/10/05/october-update-pinetime-de...

If you are a qualified developer who promised to work on apps for it (probably including an OS), then you already have one.

They have more or less stated that general availability is just waiting on someone who already has one to demonstrate a useful app. That is they could sell the hardware today, but since it won't do anything it is useless and so they see no point.

Withings, Garmin, and Polar might be worth looking at; they're in the hardware business and not the data business.

Is there a personal data vulnerability/risk with Apple Watch? I don't know of any "tracking" or other shenanigans around the personal health data gathered from it.

You can turn off iCloud sync for your Health data, but even if you keep it on, it's encrypted end-to-end across all your devices, which is nice.[1] (Some caveats apply.)

1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Ah yeah, I have iCloud sync off for everything except the one free iCloud email account. :)

Ironically, the only iCloud service that is not encrypted at rest. :P

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Ah yeah I don't care, I don't actually use it! There are probably 1-5 total emails in the account :'D

There's the general risks that they have your data and in future can change what they do it. They can be bought out in future like fitbit, which is obviously laughable at the moment but it's not the first time we've seen apple sink. Plus there's the general bluetooth privacy issues, although I think apple has a decent track record of protecting against this.

I'd be interested to know what and how much it shares info too and if it's safe against things like wifi MitM attacks.

It doesn’t matter if apple sinks because the architecture includes end to end encryption they do not hold the keys to.

I’d say Apple Watch and Apple’s health app.

I won't blame you if you call me a Garmin shill but the fact that it is a European company subject to GDPR was a big factor in my picking it over Fitbit when I was making my decision about two years ago. Edit: also I read on HN that Garmin can be used with open source sync solutions and thus not locked to the vendor for data storage was another big reason why I picked it.

Google can use the data to help advertisers better target ads to you to trick you into buying stuff you otherwise wouldn't.

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