I’m for smartwatches in general.
About a year ago, I was measuring my blood oxygen on a regular basis for a medical condition, and the oxygen meter thingy wasn’t very convenient to carry around all the time. So I got an Apple Watch (non us models had blood oxygen monitoring even back then) for the convenience and logging. This was genuinely my only concern.
The fact that the watch was displaying my exercise time and calories burned was startling to me… and extremely motivating in a way that quite literally blew my mind. I started exercising regularly, working out. My health started improving in general. I started counting calories and losing weight. I lost weight. I gained muscle that I’ve never had in my life.
I had a friend try to tell me that I could have done all these things without a smartwatch to tell me things. Empirical evidence for decades indicates otherwise. I’ve been told that it’s a crutch and that I’m a lesser man for using it. But you know, you use crutches when you can’t do what other people do. I absolutely love my smartwatch and will hear nothing against it.
I have no opinions on brands or specific models in general. They’re pretty much all the same to me. Get whatever has the features you want and like. As far as I know my apple health data stays local to my phone and my data exports, so I feel pretty safe there.
I mean, reading the article, it’s specifically for victims of people who have court ordered ankle monitors. This isn’t like tracking non-convicted citizens… these individuals have been sentenced in a court of justice to having their privacy reduced by being tracked at all times, instead of being locked up in a prison cell. This is just notifying someone who has reason to need to know about data that’s available. I don’t have much problem with this…