The Wearables Trap: How the Government Plans to Monitor, Score, and Control You |
Photograph Source: United States Department of Health and Human Services – Public Domain
Bodily autonomy—the right to privacy and integrity over our own bodies—is rapidly vanishing.
We are entering a new age of algorithmic, authoritarian control, where our thoughts, moods, and biology are monitored and judged by the state.
This is the dark promise behind the newest campaign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, to push for a future in which all Americans wear biometric health-tracking devices.
Under the guise of public health and personal empowerment, this initiative is nothing less than the normalization of 24/7 bodily surveillance—ushering in a world where every step, heartbeat, and biological fluctuation is monitored not only by private companies but also by the government.
In this emerging surveillance-industrial complex, health data becomes currency. Tech firms profit from hardware and app subscriptions, insurers profit from risk scoring, and government agencies profit from increased compliance and behavioral insight.
This convergence of health, technology, and surveillance is not a new strategy—it’s just the next step in a long, familiar pattern of control.
Surveillance has always arrived dressed as progress.
Every new wave of surveillance technology—GPS trackers, red light cameras, facial recognition, Ring doorbells, Alexa smart speakers—has been sold to us as a tool of convenience, safety, or connection. But in time, each became a mechanism for tracking, monitoring, or controlling the public.
What began as voluntary has become inescapable and mandatory.
The moment we accepted the premise that privacy must be traded for convenience, we laid the groundwork for a........