What RFK Jr.’s Wearable Plan Means for Your Freedom

The next frontier of surveillance may be hiding in plain sight and strapped to your wrist.

“RFK Jr. wants wearables on every wrist in four years. That’s not just a health campaign, it’s… infrastructure.”

It sounds helpful on the surface. A government campaign encouraging Americans to track their health using wearable devices seems like a smart, modern idea. With chronic illness, stress, and sleep deprivation at record highs, many welcomed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement as a forward-thinking solution.

Kennedy says he wants this national wearable campaign in place within four years. That timeline is no coincidence. It matches a full presidential term. He frames it as a public health revolution, one that will empower citizens with real-time data and reduce healthcare costs. But framing it that way obscures the deeper concern. It allows the government to build a nationwide biometric surveillance system during his administration, while public support is still high and scrutiny is low.

The urgency isn’t about improving wellness. It is about seizing a political moment. Rapid rollout makes oversight difficult and public debate nearly impossible. If successful, it locks in infrastructure and precedent before citizens realize what they’ve signed up for.

The Illusion of Consent

Fitbits, Apple Watches, and Oura Rings already collect vast amounts of data: heart rate, sleep cycles, blood oxygen, menstrual cycles, even mood indicators. In theory, users consent to share this with private companies. But once the government starts encouraging or incentivizing wearables, the question of consent becomes blurred.

Will participation soon be tied to insurance premiums, public benefits, or access to care? Will employers or schools require wearables for “wellness compliance”? What begins as optional often becomes expected. Eventually, it becomes required.

From Health to Control

Public health has long justified expanded state power. Vaccine mandates and quarantines show how quickly governments can curtail freedom in a crisis. But biometric surveillance is different. It is not temporary. It is not reactive. It is persistent, predictive, and invasive.

Wearable data is not passive. It reveals how we live, move, sleep, eat, and feel. This information is gold for corporations, for political campaigns, for law enforcement, and for authoritarian governments. It enables profiling and behavior prediction on a level once limited to science fiction.

The False Safety of Big Data

We are told that aggregated data improves health outcomes. That may be partly true. But aggregated data is never truly anonymous. With enough motive, it can be reverse-engineered. And when political unrest or economic crises arise, governments may decide that privacy is a luxury they cannot afford.

This is already happening. Police have used fitness tracker data to investigate crimes. In some cases, the public applauds. But the precedent is now in place. Your “personal” health data is searchable, admissible, and out of your hands.

What happens when dissent is labeled a public health threat? During COVID-19, protests were surveilled and criticized in the name of viral containment. If wearables become common or government-linked, tracking protesters’ physical location and health status becomes easy. No need for cameras or phone towers. The tracker on your wrist does the job.

Corporate Partnerships, Government Power

Another concern is the increasingly blurred line between tech companies and public agencies. Who makes the wearables? Who stores the data? Who controls access? If your biometric life is collected by a private company working with a federal agency, are you a consumer, a patient, or a citizen under surveillance?

U.S. privacy laws like HIPAA do not apply to most consumer health tech. Companies are free to share or sell your data, including to government agencies. And when the device is part of a state-backed campaign, the legal protections grow weaker.

This is not hypothetical. Amazon’s Ring has partnered with police departments. Google’s location data has been used in investigations. Now imagine that same access applied to your hormone levels or sleep habits. The tech is ready. All that is missing is a political green light and public silence.

The Path Forward

Technology itself is not the problem. Wearables can be helpful for those managing chronic illness or optimizing health. But when the state promotes these devices, we need a loud and serious public debate.

At a minimum, we should demand:

1. Strict legal safeguards blocking access to wearable data by law enforcement, insurers, or government agencies without a warrant.

2. Separation of private health data from public health programs. Promoting wellness should never require real-time body monitoring.

3. Clear, informed consent that is not hidden in fine print or tied to public benefits.

4. Independent auditing of all algorithms used in public wearable initiatives, with transparency around biases or political misuse.

5. Public education to help people understand what they are giving up when they accept a free wearable or join a health-tracking campaign.

This Is a Warning, Not a Conspiracy

This is not about rejecting tech or wearing tinfoil hats. It is about understanding the path we are on. If biometric surveillance becomes normalized through public health campaigns, we will have handed over one of the last frontiers of personal freedom: our bodies.

Once that threshold is crossed, there is no reversing it. Every step, every heartbeat, every breath becomes data for someone else to analyze, use, or weaponize.

So we must ask now, before it is too late: Who benefits when the government wants to track your health? If the answer is not you, then maybe this is not about health at all.

Maybe it is about control.

And if we do not push back now, we may not notice the loss until privacy is no longer an option.