Meta is reported to be reviving its long-gestating plan to release its own smartwatch. According to a report originating from The Information, the project, which was first mooted in 2021 before apparently being shelved, is back from the dead, and we could see a Meta watch as early as this year.
On the surface, I can see the appeal; having shunned the idea of making its own smartphone, Meta is betting big on wearables, with its Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 and Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses being a bona fide hit this year.
In 2019, the period tracking app Flo was found to be sending information to Meta (then Facebook), including sensitive information such as the user’s last period date. While the information was technically depersonalized, with names and other identifiers removed, each account also contains a unique device advertising ID number, which was not removed. Every phone has one of these numbers, which exists on both Apple and Android devices to help advertisers show you relevant ads.
Using this advertising number, it was possible to connect a user’s Flo and Facebook accounts, and for them to be served ads driven, in part, by a user’s fertility data, feeding into Facebook’s sophisticated ad algorithm.
Meta was taken to court over this in 2021, and in 2025 it was found to have violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act, with a court ruling that Meta had intentionally eavesdropped on Flo users. No punishment has yet been meted out, despite the ruling.
In 2022, another lawsuit was filed about Meta Pixel, a piece of code embedded on websites all around the world which helps website owners track activity — including hospital websites.
Pixel was sending information back to Meta from the University of Cleveland Medical Hospital every time patients scheduled an appointment. This included highly sensitive details of prescribed medications, condition diagnoses, pregnancy terminations… it was all being fed back to Meta. Many other hospitals and medical services use the Meta Pixel tool, so it’s likely this was – and perhaps still is – occuring elsewhere too.
Cutting out the middle man
These are just two examples; there are more that we know about, and likely others we don’t know about. Meta, like Google, Amazon, and other tech giants, are mass-surveillance operations first and cool gadget-makers second, and we’ve all kind of made our peace with this as the price of living in the 21st century and using these ubiquitous services. Nonetheless, we can and should demand better from these companies.
In order to obtain health information that users of its services might not want to voluntarily hand over, Meta has had to resort to the sort of tricks revealed in the above lawsuits. A smartwatch is the perfect way to cut out the middleman and get people to share their sensitive, intimate health and location data for free.
What could Meta do with this kind of information? Really, anything it wants, from serving you advertisements to handing it over to the US government. There are certain assurances Meta could make to move towards transparency: the likes of Apple and Oura provide assurances of on-device processing and end-to-end encryption, and promise to resist attempts by authorities to access your data. Meta could certainly go that route, but as Flo users found when they were promised their data was depersonalized before being shared, there’s always a workaround.
Meta has proven time and again that it can’t be trusted with users’ sensitive data, and as a result, its smartwatch would have to be something truly special – and secure – in order for me to recommend it.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
