Between his defunding of mRNA research, firing of the CDC’s entire 17-member vaccine advisory panel, and crusade against fluoride in drinking water, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA agenda has followed a fairly predictable path, given his long-standing advocacy of crank health remedies and vaccine science denialism. But in the last few months, one RFK policy has come out of left field: his embrace of wearable health technology as a “key” part of the MAHA agenda.
In the past, Kennedy was a harsh critic of the privacy problems with wearable technology. But now, he is a committed enthusiast. Curious!
Advanced surveillance devices attached to your body are rather at odds with the traditional woo-woo fashion for “natural” treatments and food. But in a way, it makes sense. Wearables—a broad category that spans smartwatches and fitness trackers to glucose monitors and therapeutic devices—have exploded in popularity in the last couple of years, as consumer preferences have shifted in a health-conscious direction and rates of chronic disease continue to rise. By promising to put more data in the hands of users and allow individuals to take a preventative approach to health care and wellness, the philosophy behind wearables often echoes the rhetoric of the MAHA movement.
In testimony to the House Energy Committee on June 24th, this connection was made explicit by Kennedy himself. Asked about Americans’ access to wearables, RFK praised the technology as “a way people can take control of their own health” and announced “one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history” to encourage their use. The goal, RFK testified, was to have “every American” using the technology in the next four years.
This full-throated endorsement by the Health and Human Services secretary was the latest win in a meteoric rise for the wearables industry, a $53 billion market whose size is projected to triple in the next decade. While “wearables started with things like tracking heart rates or steps,” says Al Noshirvani, the vice chair of the Health & Fitness Association’s board of directors, it’s now “moving at a million miles an hour. There’s a lot of new and innovative technologies that are coming out.”
Medical researchers believe that these technologies could have substantial health benefits. One study on the impact of wearables in health research found that the devices may “transform the understanding of population health dynamics and the ability to forecast health trends,” while a review of wearable device use in chronic disease management found that they “offer transformative potential for managing chronic illnesses by enhancing real-time monitoring and patient engagement.”
The philosophy behind wearables often echoes the rhetoric of the MAHA movement.
But as these products become more medically useful, the amount of data they collect necessarily grows. Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Prospect that general-purpose wearables “tend to collect a variety of health data, including heart rate and rhythm, blood oxygen level, menstrual health, sleep patterns, and general movement info.” Other, more medically oriented devices collect additional data, such as blood glucose levels. Needless to say, this data can be highly sensitive.
Experts stress that there are significant data privacy concerns associated with the collection and storage of this personal information. “In the United States, there’s not a comprehensive federal law regulating data privacy whatsoever,” Alicia Jessop, an associate professor at Pepperdine University and an attorney in sport law, told the Prospect. While many consumers assume that HIPAA protects their medical information, that landmark privacy law only covers the relationship between “the doctor and the patient,” meaning that the data collected by wearables exists outside of HIPAA’s umbrella.
Jessop says that as the wearables industry has grown, “their use of data has become more widespread.” Today, wearables companies sometimes share data with third parties—such as businesses, researchers, or consultants—through contractual agreements that users “might not even realize exist.” Even if the data stays in-house, wearables firms may “evaluate and mine the data” for advertising purposes or to train AI models. These concerns are not merely theoretical—just a few weeks ago, the wearables firm WHOOP was accused of “disclosing to a third party the sensitive personal data of its fitness tracker and app users” in violation of its privacy policy and California law.
The WHOOP lawsuit shows how in the absence of federal regulation to protect users’ data privacy, states and localities have tried to fill the gap. Twenty U.S. states have enacted comprehensive data privacy laws—California’s Consumer Privacy Act being the strongest in the country—while a number of states and localities have enacted biometric privacy laws as well. Jessop says that these laws require companies to obtain consumers’ “informed consent” about what data they are gathering, how that data is stored, and how it’s used, but consumers often authorize the internal use or external sale of that data in privacy policies they mindlessly skip through. For users not located in one of these states, Klosowski, the security and privacy activist, simply said that their data privacy environment “is not super regulated.”
Once upon a time, these data privacy concerns were front of mind for Kennedy. On a 2020 episode of his podcast TRUTH—produced by the anti-vaccine Children’s Health Defense—RFK told listeners that “anything that you call smart,” including “your Apple Watch,” are “about two things: surveillance, and harvesting data.” Comparing this “free data” to the oil and gold rushes of days past, the current HHS secretary warned his audience against plots meant to “turn you into a permanent consumer” through the analysis and monetization of “billions of terabytes of data.”
But today, RFK is telling a very different story about wearables and data privacy. On July 30th, Kennedy’s HHS held a “Make Health Tech Great Again” event where he announced the CMS Health Technology Ecosystem initiative, a voluntary program of data exchange among over 60 health and technology companies. If Americans opt in to this program, their health data will enter a data-sharing network accessible by all participating companies, with the goal of increasing individuals’ access to their medical records and allowing them to take a more personalized approach to their health care. Wearables and the wellness apps they pair with appear central to this program: Not only are wearables firms like Oura listed as participating firms, but HHS’s introductory video for the program shows what appears to be an AI-generated video of a woman scanning her smartwatch and uploading the data into a health app.
For Jessop, this program exhibits huge red flags. “As it stands,” she told the Prospect, “there’s no federal law that is going to protect against these companies weaponizing this data against the American public.” In practice, this could look like insurance companies joining the initiative and using the data to “kick people off their insurance or raise premiums,” or tech companies using the data to train AI systems or fine-tune their advertising algorithms.
And the data privacy concerns with the CMS Health Technology Ecosystem initiative are not just limited to private corporations. Noshirvani says that there’s a lot of worry about data sharing “not just with a third party app, but with the government.” In light of the Trump administration’s use of confidential government data to bring trumped-up charges of mortgage fraud against Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, Sen. Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Americans have reasons to be concerned.
So here’s where RFK’s supposedly radical critique of American nutrition and health care has landed: a big corporate-backed sales pitch supposedly meant to empower Americans to improve their health individually, but practically designed to give Big Tech and AI companies more consumer data with no regulatory constraints. It’s like Reaganism in a hemp tunic.