What's in a lifetime? For me and Garmin, the answer is simple: 100,000km, 22 million steps, 2,400 hours. We've gone a long way in the roughly six years we've spent together.
But whose is that lifetime of data? Mine or the company that has helped me track it? The answer has always been a little complicated. But lately it feels like it's getting heated, too.
In late March, Garmin announced that it was rolling out its first ever subscription fee. Users of the company's watches and other products – themselves already not cheap – could now pay a monthly fee for extra features, which started with a relatively limited set, mostly new ways to look at your existing data.
It led to outrage; the Garmin forum on Reddit has rarely looked so angry. It wasn't just the fact that those users already paid a lot for their devices and that they feared they wouldn't get access to new features. It also seemed to unsettle a core principle of fitness trackers: they track perhaps your most intimate data, they watch your actual heart, and so you should be able to see whatever they've found.
Garmin is far from the only health and fitness company to offer a monthly paid subscription. In fact, it was something of an outlier for not having such an offering – and that as well as the fear of being left behind on AI might have been the reason for launching one. Other fitness and health tracking companies such as Whoop and Oura have long been offering one.
But that hasn't helped those companies steer clear of controversy. A few weeks after Garmin's launch came Whoop's announcement of its new generation of band. (The fitness tracker is like a soft bracelet, and does not have a screen.) Whoop probably wanted the discussion to be about its (relatively limited) upgrades, but it will now probably go down in history for being a particularly botched rollout.
Whoop customers pay a hefty monthly subscription fee in return for the band and the app that go with it. The implicit (and sometimes more explicit) suggestion from the company was that as new bands were revealed then customers would get them, all as part of that monthly fee. The new rollout didn't include that assurance for everyone, and has led to outrage among at least some Whoop members.
That in part is a simple feeling of being ripped off for paying such a substantial amount of money. But it also speaks to the feeling of not knowing exactly what it is you are paying for, and what you own: without the monthly fee, the device is largely useless already, and you won't even be kept on the latest hardware.
Recently, companies have justified their monthly fees in part by reference to artificial intelligence; Garmin made that a central part of the rollout of Connect+, and Strava recently added it to its existing premium subscription. There is at least some argument that it represents an ongoing cost, since those companies must either build and maintain their own AI to deal with those requests, or more likely hand them off to an external AI company.
But AI is also a good reminder that our data is even less ours than it has been in the past. Now, any post you left anywhere on the internet – no matter how personal or intimate – might have been chewed up to train the very models that we are now paying to tell us about ourselves.
The question of who really owns our technology has never been an easy one to answer. From the early 20th century, companies began to make it harder to alter and fix your own things: early Fords, for instance, helped begin the "right to repair" movement that demands the ability to modify products.
But as our products become more connected to the world, they also become less our own. Arguments about whether you should be able to replace your own spark plugs seem relatively innocent in an era where connected cars can update and drive themselves remotely – or even shut themselves down.
Every logged step, every shared photo, every post is now the same: the moment itself that they represent might be ours, but the log itself is part of a complex and unknowable web of ownership and public view. The internet might never have been more personal, but it's never been less clear what counts as ours.
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