I’d like to hear your opinion on smart watches and also your personal setup, use case and threatmodel if you wear one, as I’m not opposed to the idea of smart watches.
I was inspired to make this post after a friend of mine completely abandoned smart watches after the Stanislav Rzhitsky incident, even tough I’m well aware it wasn’t the smart watch directly that got him killed.
My personal setup is the following:
Garmin Fenix 7 setup using a secondary phone which has no personal information associated with me with all it’s traffic routed truth orbot. The watch itself was never connected to wifi and I don’t sync it with a phone since the information provided on the watch is enough for me.
I primarily use it for telling the time, but also use the navigation, fitness and music listening features as I don’t have my phone on me at all times.
From what I know GPS is a one-way system and the maps are all offline. Bluetooth isn’t a problem in my threatmodel but it remains off when not in use.
Sorry to pop your bubble but I would rather use a simple watch rather than a smart one especially if I am already carrying a phone on my pocket.
The whole point of the smart watch is its connectivity with its attached ecosystem. If you don’t connect it to a phone, it sort of loses the entire point.
Changing the watch face could also be a cool feature. The only interesting reason for me is to get one is the fitness tracking and the phone can already do some of that.
Is there a privacy-conscious fitness tracker out there? I would love to track things like my heartrate while exercising, and maybe my sleep, but I don’t need any ecosystem beyond that. Just stats.
I use an apple watch, only sync the health data to the phone it’s connected to and none of my other apple devices. I definitely do not use Strava lmao, it’s all within the native apple stuff so I trust that it’s probably safe from an insurance company snooping on it.
My threat model is more about avoiding surveillance capitalism and state actors from unfriendly nations, so using an iPhone+apple watch works out for me
I’m in. the RePebble project may be the Linux of smartwatches we’ve been waiting for.
(also hardware has not been open sourced by Google, it’s mostly just the software)
The main benefit I have found from using a smart watch is the ability to be phone free for many hours of the day. I am using and trusting the Apple ecosystem. The haptic notifications have replaced a ringing phone or chirps of messages arriving. I currently think that I am in a reduced level of surveillance capitalism as I can get. (trade off of useful services and data collection).
