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Bethany Arreola wore an Oura ring for two years. She started using it because of its integration with Natural Cycles, a birth control app approved by the Food and Drug Administration that uses body temperature data collected by Oura to forecast menstrual cycles. This information can help people prevent pregnancy or become pregnant. She came to love the wearable, and credits it with repairing her relationship with sleep.
But now she’s taken the ring off. “I’ve canceled my subscription, canceled my account, and removed my data,” Arreola told Slate. “Now it’s just sitting on my desk while I decide if I want to trade it in or not.”
She made the decision after coming across eye-catching posts on the Oura subreddit. This followed an Aug. 27 announcement: Oura, the Finnish health technology company behind the smart ring, announced it was opening a manufacturing facility in Texas to “better meet the needs of the DoD.” The company also reiterated its position as “the trusted wearable of choice” to the Department of Defense. A company spokesperson told Slate that while the news about the manufacturing facility was new, the nature of the relationship between Oura and the DOD, which began in 2019, had not changed.
But for many users, the fact that the DOD is Oura’s largest enterprise customer was new information—and unwelcome. The backlash intensified when users noticed a detail in Oura’s post: Palantir, the controversial software company partly founded by Peter Thiel, was involved because of Palantir’s software and data contract with the DOD. The conversation quickly gained traction online, primarily on Reddit and TikTok, with some users saying it was time to ditch the ring because of security, privacy, and ethical concerns.
Oura attributes the backlash to misinformation. Less than a week after the initial announcement, CEO Tom Hale posted a video to the company’s subreddit clarifying that early, viral claims about Oura sharing user data with Palantir were false. To meet government security requirements, the Oura Enterprise Platform—separate from its consumer-facing platform—is required to use Palantir’s FedStart hosting environment. The DOD can only access data that has been shared by service members who’ve consented.
But still, Arreola took off her ring because she’s uncomfortable with the layers of affiliations—with the government, with Peter Thiel—that clash with her values. And despite Oura’s assurances that it won’t sell user data, she still doesn’t feel protected.
While Oura has focused on correcting misinformation, users like Arreola show that some concerns run deeper and are inspiring a rethinking of what to expect from tech. While the growing mutualism between tech and government strengthens, it may leave some consumers behind, particularly women concerned about surveillance and the exploitation of reproductive health data. These consumers’ growing mistrust of technology is linked to their unwillingness to support companies that profit from an administration causing them unease.
The conversation around Oura might also signal that the threat of shared wearable data might be shaking some out of their data-sharing fatigue.
“It’s understandable that consumers would be cautious, particularly at this moment in time, in their analysis of a device that is on their body and potentially monitoring sensitive information,” Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor of law and engineering at Penn State who has worked in both the public and private sectors, told Slate. “Thinking through how data is collected, used, shared, and controlled is a sign of the evolving sophistication of the consumer base.”
When Maggie Gehlsen-Burnett and her husband decided they were ready to start a family, she bought an Oura ring. She also wanted to use the temperature tracking feature as a way to chart her cycle. Gehlsen-Burnett wore it constantly, which made it difficult when she decided to take it off.
Gehlsen-Burnett understands why Oura issued statements telling users that their data was safe, secure, and not shared with the DOD. But her primary concern was the partnership itself. “If this were happening under another administration, it would be a completely different conversation,” Gehlsen-Burnett told Slate.
Her TikTok about the partnership garnered nearly 4,000 likes and 250 comments, and she’s noticed that the conversation in that space hints at a broader trend: Distrust in the Trump administration is causing people to reconsider who has access to their data. Specifically, their biometric data.
“People who didn’t care about their data before are now kind of looking at it differently,” she explained. “This is especially true for women who are thinking about their reproductive health care.”
This is somewhat of a departure from the norm. Stefanie Felsberger, a research associate at the Minderoo Center for Technology and Democracy, studies data privacy concerns around the use of menstrual cycle tracking apps. She’s found that because users value the app’s benefits, they often overlook seemingly abstract harms. When she would talk about these potential harms, like policing abortion access, study participants would sometimes become overwhelmed.
Felsberger thinks there are tech companies that are well-intentioned and do want to follow through on their promises to customers. But there are structural limitations to ensuring that happens. “A promise is just a promise,” said Felsberger. “Companies can change their terms of service at any point.” (For example, OpenAI changed its terms of service in 2024 to allow military use of ChatGPT.)
Further, most smart rings are not medical devices, and Matwyshyn points out that wearables are often not under FDA regulation. Instead, they’re subject to less oversight, which can raise concerns about privacy commitments. (In 2024, Hale said in an interview that Oura is seeking FDA approval but declined to provide further details.)
Refusing to sell data is different from not licensing or sharing data. In turn, there can be some slipperiness in the way companies talk about their privacy and security promises. “It’s definitely a buyer-beware situation,” Matwyshyn said. Even if a company says it will “oppose” sharing data with authorities, she notes that most companies comply with legal demands after the appropriate process.
It’s also a challenge for tech companies to convince the public that they are trustworthy when there are so many bad actors making the same promises. “Right now it’s next to impossible for a consumer to determine high trustworthiness,” said Matwyshyn. She’d like wearables to have the same level of labeling and disclosure regimes we have around food. Until then, she said, “We’re in a technology mystery-meat environment.”
And data could be used in ways “we could have never imagined,” Jessa Lingel, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Slate. For example, researchers warn that fitness trackers could be used to deny insurance. Chat logs and search histories have already been used to make abortion-related arrests. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has tools that enable hacking into encrypted apps.
“It’s not paranoid to be concerned about your data,” Lingel said. “It’s justified.”
Sarah Tingley stopped wearing her Oura ring when Roe v. Wade was overturned. She lives in Florida, where there’s a six-week abortion ban. Research suggests that many people, especially young people, do not find out they are pregnant until after the six-week mark.
“I personally did not feel comfortable having any sort of data on my phone that could track a pregnancy if I were to become pregnant,” Tingley told Slate. “I did not feel safe that there wouldn’t be any laws made, especially in the state of Florida, to be able to get that information.”
In the United States, the information people tend to feel most private about is their health data, and this tendency may be one factor fueling the backlash against the Oura announcement, said Lingel. The personal nature of the Oura ring, marketed for self-improvement, likely compounded some users’ unease.
“People see what’s happened as very personal because the product was sold to them that way,” she said.
Arreola does “feel very different about my biometric data versus the data that’s probably being collected from me on TikTok, my iPhone, those types of things.” Tingley feels similar and observed that if she lived in a blue state, she might be more trusting with her data.
This wouldn’t change the high-level concerns with wearables, but is aligned with the finding that people in the U.S. tend to trust the private sector more than the government with sensitive information, said Matwyshyn.
That said, a scroll through the Oura subreddit will show other users who don’t have a problem or have accepted the DOD partnership. Kelly Gates is an associate professor who researches technology and surveillance at the University of California, San Diego. She told Slate she’s found that there are always people who are resigned to sharing data, and how concerned they are is “a matter of where they fall in relationship to the status quo.”
Arreola heard about the Oura ring from other women who were also using it for tracking their menstrual cycles. The enthusiasm from this peer group gave the smart ring credibility, and she recommended it to her friends. She was also encouraged when, after the 2024 election, Oura updated and shared a statement on its commitment to reproductive health data privacy.
“I really respected them in that moment,” said Arreola. “The statement made me feel seen, and they gained my trust even more.”
Now, the DOD partnership and its inherent link to Thiel—who has funded anti-abortion candidates, and invests in alt-right, pronatalist projects—feels “like a betrayal.”
Hale downplayed the Palantir connection, describing it as a “small commercial relationship.” A spokesperson told Slate that Palantir is a security layer over the platform that houses DoD data, and that it’s an “inherited relationship” after Oura acquired Sparta Science’s Trinsic data platform.
When asked for comment on the view that some users see Oura’s announcement as a profitable expansion and reinvestment in the federal government at a time when federal actions threaten reproductive health, a spokesperson for Oura told Slate that the company is “committed to helping people—including service men and women—take charge of their health with actionable insights and data.”
Tingley also views the DOD-Oura partnership as a contradiction to her understanding of the company. “I don’t think a company marketed to women and trying to help them regulate and better understand their bodies should be working with the government,” she said.
Lingel is interested in the mental calculations we make when weighing the benefits of using a device we enjoy while recognizing our data will be used in ways we can’t fully grasp. There is a unique relationship to personal health information for women because of the gender bias in receiving appropriate care, she observed. This is why some women use tech like the Oura ring: to have data that helps them have more control and confidence in health care conversations.
It’s why Arreola finds the situation all the more frustrating. She likes her ring and wants to use something she’s found useful for her health without finding out it’s linked to factors she’s uncomfortable with. She gets that Palantir has many commercial partnerships, and there will be instances where she can’t avoid interacting, in some capacity, with the company.
“But no one is making me wear a ring,” she said. “I can at least make that choice for myself.”