The AI tech on our wrists should lead us to one big question: is our data really ours?

The Garmin forum on Reddit is usually a fairly placid place. As perhaps the only social network that largely allows people to indulge their interests and is mostly free from AI slop and political fights, Reddit is the perfect place for those people with a keen interest in their watches to find fellow travellers. The Garmin forum is largely what you’d expect, and in line with other specific subreddits: pictures of watches on people’s wrists, questions about features, speculation about new releases and nostalgia about old ones.

Until it isn’t. And it wasn’t at the end of March. That day, the company announced Connect+, a monthly subscription that offers, in Garmin’s words, “premium features” and “even more personalised insights” gathered from their smartwatches, in return for $6.99 per month. or the same in pounds.

Those features include extra coaching and workouts as well as social features, but the most notable by far was what Garmin calls “Active Intelligence”, an AI-powered feature that aims to give written summaries of a day and its activities.

Garmin users reacted with outrage. The focus of the reaction wasn’t so much about what was contained in the offering, but rather that it was being offered at all. Why were customers being asked to pay a premium for “premium features” when they had already paid a hefty sum for smartwatches that are considerably more expensive than competitors’ and can already cost up to $3,000?

The company was clear at launch that no existing features would be going behind a paywall. And in the time since, it has looked to reassure customers that they would not be missing out on new ones, either, at a roundtable a couple of months after launch, the head of Garmin’s fitness segment said that the team working on features that were intended for Connect+ is bigger than those working on features for the new subscription, and that resources had not been diverted away from the former into the latter. “I know people believe we don’t do free stuff in Garmin Connect anymore, which is not a true statement in any way, shape or form,” said Joe Schrick.

But customers had plenty of reason to be cautious: Garmin was very unusual among fitness tech companies, or indeed tech companies of any kind, in not offering a monthly subscription. Many of its competitors and collaborators – from smart fitness ring Oura to active social network Strava – already require their customers to pay a monthly fee for their full features, or in some cases for any features at all.

The argument is partly that all those calculations are expensive, especially in the era of artificial intelligence, when crunching that data can be pricey work, especially for fitness companies that are buying the AI technology from other firms. You are not necessarily paying for the tracker, the argument goes, but the insights and recommendations that you get from it.

But those insights are dependent on our own data, which, considering it includes each beat of your heart, is among the most intimate and personal information there is. And that feels like it should belong to customers.

Indeed, that has been Garmin’s position in the past. In 2022, as other companies such as Fitbit were launching paywalls, Garmin’s Phil McClendon told The Verge: “We’re not charging you the ability to access your data, and that’s something we will continue to do and that we feel very strongly about.” Mr McClendon is no longer at Garmin and his statement arguably remains true even in the era of Connect+ – but his use of the phrase “your data” seems a recognition of how important it is to the people whose hearts are in it.

Those inside Garmin who had been worriedly looking at the subreddit were spared a little at the beginning of May – when Whoop launched a new product and lit its own forum on the site alight. Whoop’s focus was its new strap, but the launch turned out to be about everything else.

Whoop is a fitness tracker without a screen: it looks like a band of soft material, and sends its data to a connected phone, where all of the data and the information can be seen. The new version was a relatively limited upgrade that made the band a little smaller and added new software features such as guesses at your blood pressure. But it came with another, far more important change.

Whoop had always asked people to pay its hefty subscription with the implicit suggestion that it was for access to the data and the insights that came from it – the band itself was secondary. As such, many customers believed that they should get access to new bands when they came out, as has happened in the past. This time around, however, they didn’t, with Whoop asking for an upgrade fee for the new strap.

Customers called it a “bait and switch”, arguing they had been misled by a company that they had been paying a significant fee for, in some cases, years. Whoop backtracked a little, refunding some customers’ fees, but the Reddit forum has not calmed down.

Our devices have never truly been our own. For nearly a century, car companies have been making it harder for their customers to fix their own vehicles with their own parts; Nintendo can break the upcoming Switch 2 remotely if customers are pirating software. The “right to repair” movement is strong and growing as a result of those trends, but it only exists because devices are largely impossible to repair or tinker with today.

The problem is only becoming broader as AI moves further into the mainstream. Many technology companies are making it a central part of their premium offerings, and asking for a subscription in part because of the expensive computing work required. But such systems are by definition built on vast amounts of data to be trained in the first place, which in many cases was harvested from the internet without consent or discretion, and so might well have belonged to the people that are now asking to pay for access to those models.

At the same time, however, companies seem increasingly aware of the anxiety we feel about having our data taken, read, used and spread. Both Apple and WhatsApp have recently run advertising campaigns specifically focused on privacy features – not showing off exciting new features, but the technology underpinning them that means our conversations cannot be read by the company or anyone else.

Our devices collect our most intimate moments: our sleep, our heartbeats, our stress and our movements. But it is increasingly unclear who that data belongs to. It might be the most intimate data there is – but just because it’s personal doesn’t mean it’s entirely ours.