Professional Athletes and Wearables

I haven’t thought about the privacy issues surrounding professional athletes and wearables.

Wearables present serious privacy issues for “Average Joe” consumers, who are entrusting tech companies to safely store and protect their biometric data. Imagine the stakes for a professional athlete, whose entire livelihood could be affected by a single biometric data point. To give one of many realistic hypotheticals: a basketball player has a terrible game, and the coach wonders if they showed up to the gym hungover. The coach has access to the player’s wearable data, and checks to see when they went to sleep, as well as what their heart rate looked like during the night. Should the player have been out partying before a game? No. Should the coach be able to surveil them? Definitely not.

It will not surprise you to learn that there’s an emergent gambling angle here: sports leagues would love to commercialize players’ biometric data, and sharp bettors would love access to data about, say, a hungover player. “We’re going to get to a spot where people are betting not just on the velocity of the puck that was shot by a player in the NHL playoffs, but on what the heart rate of a certain player is going to be running down the field,” said Helen “Nellie” Drew, the director of the University of Buffalo’s Center for the Advancement of Sport, and a professor of practice in sports law.

There are other practical considerations, too. What if wearable data reveals that a player isn’t as speedy as they were before, and a team uses that data against the player during contract negotiations? What if a wearable reveals a player is favoring their leg, or is at greater risk of injury? This information is potentially beneficial to a training staff and an athlete, so long as it’s disclosed and used in a responsible manner—a critical, mostly unresolved caveat. “Aging and injured players are the most at-risk” of wearable data being used against them, said Michael LeRoy, who researches sports labor laws and AI, and is a professor at the University of Illinois’s School of Labor and Employment Relations.

The bit about gamblers is particularly scary.

I have often said that surveillance tech is generally deployed first against people with diminished rights: children, prisoners, military personnel, the mentally impaired. This is another early use case with different dynamics. The surveilled are wealthy and powerful, and—in many cases—unionized.

Tags: gambling, privacy, sports, surveillance

Posted on June 22, 2026 at 7:02 AM • 6 Comments

Comments

Rontea • June 22, 2026 9:16 AM

The WNBA’s new labor contract is a landmark victory for the players, but as Julie Cohen might observe, the shine comes with a shadow. The league now has a foothold in the most intimate corners of an athlete’s life: her heartbeat, her sleep, the quiet, vulnerable data points that make her human. On the surface, this is a story of triumph—better pay, better travel, better protection for mothers. But tucked into the fine print is a question that lingers like a cliffhanger: what price will be paid for progress if your body becomes the league’s property in all but name? Sometimes the story doesn’t end with the buzzer—it follows you home, pulsing in your wrist, whispering in the dark.

Dave • June 22, 2026 9:23 AM

The problem with wearable is that it is 90% marketing fluff. Most of the metrics are not actionable in any way that is meaningful to a professional athlete. The most meaningful metrics are resting heart rate and HRV but these metrics are only useful longitudinally. A single reading over night tells one nothing; Tossed and turned in the night and the watched slipped two cm down the wrist and the RHR and HRV goes wonky. The claim that one can tell if an athlete was partying or drunk from their wearable is utter tosh. Too many false positives.

The average purchaser of a Garmin smartwatch walks slightly over 3000 steps a day. It’s a status symbol, not a health device. Same as shoes.

The part about gambling is as scary as the adage that a fool and his money are soon parted.

Q • June 22, 2026 11:06 AM

The wearables don’t need to be online. They don’t need to communicate all their data to a central server. They have more than enough capability to store the data locally and/or connect only locally to the buyers system for backup and analysis.

There is no need to involve any third parties.

But they do, of course. The manufacturers choose to make the devices dependant upon the their servers. It isn’t a necessity, it is a choice. And the choice isn’t made by the buyer, it is imposed by the maker as some sort of need that it can only work if the maker keeps themselves in the loop.

Don’t buy these kind of things. Don’t fall for the fancy marketing. If someone still decides they really need one then look for one that doesn’t tether itself to someone else’s computer. Look for one that allows people to keep their own data and make their own choices about who to share the data with.

TimH • June 22, 2026 12:01 PM

@Q: another reason not to buy a product that requires manufacturer communication to operate is that the manufacturer can obsolete a perfectly fine product by disabling the server. Google, Amazon…

Anna • June 22, 2026 1:09 PM

I would take security and privacy considerations of smartwatches and activity monitors seriously even while not a pro athlete. If the company you work for, or your insurance company, gives you a smartwatch or activity tracker, who owns the data, and do you even have a reasonable way to ensure your health data is yours? As long as the sports, partying or actions focused on continuation of the human species happen outside of one’s work hours, it should not be of relevance to the employer or insurance firm at all.
I guess the legislation depends also on the country.

lurker • June 22, 2026 1:49 PM

@Bruce

Should the player have been out partying before a game? No. Should the coach be able to surveil them? Definitely not.

I hope whoever wrote that has lawyered up. @Rontea already said it in their own special way: Professional athletes are hired on a contract. A contract binds the behaviour of both parties. Check the fine print.

@Q
indeed, don’t play is the answer to most of these “smart” devices, but what if the player’s contract says they have to wear one, and its data has to be accessible to someone else?

Schneier on Security

Professional Athletes and Wearables

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