Garmin Vivofit Jr 3

When your *Privacy Not Included researcher wanted to get a fitness tracker, Garmin is what she went with. Garmin seems to do one of the best jobs handling the privacy and security of all the personal data fitness trackers collect. They did suffer that very public ransomware attack in 2020. Ransomware attacks suck and it seems no company is safe from them these days.

Garmin says they don’t sell your personal data to anyone. This is great. Garmin also seems to do a good job with what data they do share, which doesn’t seem to be too much. They ask for explicit consent before sharing things like location data for navigation purposes and emails for marketing. And this fitness tracker for kids does have parental controls, which is good.

Garmin may share or sell de-identified aggregate data collected by the Garmin Connect app with third parties to do things like make their features better or for research purposes. This doesn’t worry us too much. Although now is a good time to remind you that it’s been found to be pretty easy to de-anonymize some types of data and track down an individual’s patterns, especially with location data. If you’re worried about this, you can opt out of using the Garmin Connect app, you’ll just lose a lot of cool data about your sleep, stress, and menstrual cycles if you do.

One thing for parents to consider. This device tracks the activity and sleep of a child. Parents should ask themselves, is this information something I want gathered and potentially accessible to others if there were a data leak or security vulnerability? Also, we think there is a good question to be raised about teaching young children that this level of digital surveillance in their lives is OK.