The Journal

What happens to your health data

Clear, unhurried writing about wearable privacy — how the industry actually works, what the policies really say, and how to check any device for yourself.

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How it worksLatest

What Is a Good HRV? Normal Ranges by Age, and Why Yours Is Different

Everyone wants a number to compare themselves against. HRV is the metric where that instinct does the most damage — here’s what a good HRV actually means, and why your own baseline is the only benchmark worth having.

Read the article →7 min read
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How it works

What Is a Sleep Score, and Should You Trust It?

Your watch turns eight hours of biology into a single number out of 100. Here’s what actually goes into it, what the sensors on your wrist can and can’t see, and why two devices score the same night differently.

Read →8 min
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Buying guide

Smartwatches Without a Subscription: What’s Actually Free and What’s Paywalled

The sticker price is the smallest number in the transaction. Here’s which wearables genuinely work without a subscription, what gets paywalled, and the five-year maths nobody shows you.

Read →5 min
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Buying guide

The Best Privacy-Focused Smartwatches and Fitness Trackers in 2026

Every wearable brand claims to take privacy seriously. Five structural questions cut through the marketing — and they sort the market far more sharply than any feature list.

Read →7 min
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How it works

On-Device vs. Cloud Health Tracking: Why Where Your Data Is Processed Decides Who Sees It

Two wearables can record the identical heartbeat and end up somewhere completely different. The architecture behind that difference is the single biggest privacy decision a wearable company makes.

Read →6 min
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Data privacy

Do Fitness Trackers Sell Your Data? What Really Happens to Your Health Data

“We don’t sell your data” is one of the most carefully written sentences in tech. Here’s what it leaves out, why HIPAA almost never applies to a wearable, and how to audit your own tracker in ten minutes.

Read →9 min

We write these because the answers were hard to find when we went looking for them ourselves.

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