Your Oura Ring Might Be Snitching (But Probably Isn't?)

How a boring corporate announcement triggered the health data privacy apocalypse

* Image of Equinox x OURA custom ring with ring cover from a partnership I created last year *

Last week, OURA announced they're setting up U.S. manufacturing for defense business. What should have been boring corporate news triggered a privacy meltdown that made TikTok users dramatically ditch their rings and spiral about data sales to Palantir (they're not selling data - just using Palantir's infrastructure, which is still weird). CEO Tom Hale had to issue a damage-control statement.

But this freakout wasn't really about Oura. It was about something bigger.

We're living through the largest consumer privacy awakening I've seen, and health data hits different. There's something uniquely unsettling about your most intimate biological information - heart rate spikes, sleep patterns, stress responses - potentially ending up in corporate databases getting monetized by strangers.

The 23andMe situation taught us this lesson. Millions spit into tubes for ancestry insights, only to discover their genetic blueprints were being shopped around. Now we're strapping even more sophisticated surveillance to our bodies, and the collective "wait, what?" moment was inevitable.

A cybersecurity expert's advice to The Cut was peak dystopia: wear wearables less often to create less data. Which is like saying avoid data breaches by living like a hermit, but honestly? Not the worst idea.

The real question isn't whether Oura is evil - it's whether any of us actually read those terms we click through at 2 a.m.

I love my Oura but even I found myself leaving it off the last few days.