INVASIVE TECH: Amazon’s New Health Band Collects All Sorts of Personal Information Never Before Collected
Evan James
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Amazon has released a health-tracking bracelet which collects all kinds of invasive personal information that similar trackers, like the Apple Watch and Fitbit, do not collect.
The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post reviewed the Halo Band in an article published Thursday. As of now the Halo costs $65, though it will eventually cost $100 along with a $4 monthly fee once Amazon decides to sell more.
The fabric bracelet comes with a microphone, but unlike the Apple Watch and Fitbit it does not have a screen, sounds, or vibrations. All the data is accessed on the Halo’s smartphone app instead.
What’s most off-putting is the invasiveness of the information it collects about you. “The Halo Band asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone so that it can make 3-D scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice,” says WaPo’s review. It will tell you if you haven’t exercised or slept enough; it will describe your tone of voice; and all those pictures of your body and all those voice recordings will get analyzed by the tracker’s machine learning technology.
All in all, the review concludes the following: “The Halo collects the most intimate information we’ve seen from a consumer health gadget—and makes the absolute least of it. This wearable is much better at helping Amazon gather data than at helping you get healthy and happy.”
You will never catch me buying the Halo, let alone any other Amazon data-collecting machine like Alexa.
In other Amazon related news, Big League Politics covered Amazon’s decision to ban a book about COVID-19 that disagreed with The Official Narrative:
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