I Tried Amazon's New Fitness Tracker and It Completely Creeped Me Out
In retrospect, I gave up on my Amazon Halo at approximately 1:15 a.m. on January 1, 2021. Or maybe it gave up on me. I opened up the companion iPhone app for the tech giant’s fitness tracker, which by that point I’d had strapped to my wrist for the better part of a month, to check on the “points” I’d racked up for the week and figure out how much exercise I’d need to squeeze into the coming weekend to meet my goal.
Amazon Halo
$100.00, Amazon
The Halo keeps track of an almost-alarming range of biometric data: your sleep patterns and heart rate, step count and body fat. It listens to your every conversation and evaluates your vocal tone to evaluate how you're coming off to other people. But it’s most insistent that you earn 150 “points” in a Monday-Sunday window. A minute of moderate activity gets you one point, while one minute of intense activity gets you two. You get a point for every 20 minutes of light activity but get docked a point for every hour over eight that Halo thinks you’re sedentary. (The company says it's based on a mix of heart rate and movement data, but as far as I can tell this almost exactly tracked the American College of Sports Medicine’s recommendation that people get 150 to 300 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 to 100 minutes of intense exercise per week. For such a futuristic gadget it’s a sensible if not exactly cutting-edge baseline.)
In theory, this is a nice system, one that cuts through the abstractions of step counters, burned-calorie metrics, blood-oxygen levels, balancing sitting vs. standing, and so on. You’ve got one number you’re supposed to care about, and it’s 150. If you go higher, great. If you don’t, whatever, there’s always next week. But since getting my Halo, I’d been fastidious about hitting 150, if only because it seemed so easy. I play a bunch of golf and have dogs, so as long as I went to the course a couple times and took the dogs on their daily walks, I could coast my way to validation. New Year’s Day was on a Friday, and when I’d checked my Halo a few hours prior, I’d been in the neighborhood of 110—not great, but nothing a couple miles with the dogs and a trip to the driving range couldn’t fix before the counter reset on Monday.
But when I checked the Halo app at 1:15 a.m., just before I laid me down to sleep, I discovered that, like the vengeful roar of the Y2K bug that never bit, my precious Halo points had stayed behind in the old year and I was back at zero. My points! My precious points! What would this betrayal do to my weekly averages? The magic man living in my wrist was going to get mad at me because of his own mistake. The betrayal of it all broke a spell. The Halo’s sporty silver-gray-blue band, whose stitching seemed to swallow all incoming light while simultaneously reflecting some of it, suddenly seemed less like a funny novelty and instead like a single, elasticated handcuff, a symbol of how, without even realizing it, I’d reoriented my entire life around a more-invasive Fitbit.
And it is quite invasive. When I first strapped this thing on, I knew that in a very real way I was abdicating some sense of privacy. What I didn’t realize initially, though, was that in addition to agreeing to let Amazon anonymize and store my data, I was also giving up my right not to be judged harshly in my lowest moments. Probably the most distinctive feature of the Halo is that, unless you press a button to pause it, it uses machine learning to assess every word you speak in order to, as the company puts it, “analyze energy and positivity in a customer’s voice so they can better understand how they may sound to others, helping improve their communication and relationships.” In practice, this meant that when I lost $12 in a Zoom poker hand and reflexively dropped an f-bomb in front of a handful of longtime friends, Amazon Halo’s voice analyzer told me I sounded “angry, astonished, or disgusted.” When I lazed in bed all morning and at one point sang along to Roxy Music’s “Mother of Pearl,” Amazon Halo took back some of my precious points and then informed me that I was coming across as “opinionated” (though that might be more of a commentary on Bryan Ferry). When, as an experiment, I read my Halo a local news report in the fake-happy cadence of a TV anchor, it was happy and told me I sounded energetic and authoritative. What I’m saying is, maybe machine learning is not a perfect technology for assessing how you sound to other people.
The feeling of being surveilled by something stupid and malevolent didn’t come solely from the vocal tone feature: When I didn’t get enough sleep one night, the Halo recommended I look into a course that would help “break the cycle of sleeplessness and anger,” which only made me feel more angry and alert. Then there’s Amazon’s boast that Halo can measure your body fat percentage, which its product page claims “is nearly 2x as accurate as leading at-home smart scales.” The way it works is it uses photographs to create a 3D model, and then gives you a little slider so you could see what your body would look like with more or less fat. However, multiple reporters have found that Halo’s methods often leave users with an inaccurately high measurement of their body-fat percentage, which compounds the very obvious risk that, as OneZero’s Angela Lashbrook has pointed out, such a feature might pose to those who are experiencing or have experienced body-image issues or disordered eating.
The overall experience of wearing this thing, in fact, has been one of creeping anxiety. Because I’ve spent all day writing this, I have earned zero fitness points and—as if my Amazon Halo has sent electrical signals down into my wrist and up the nerve endings directly into my brain—I feel an overwhelming urge to pause my writing and get moving. I know that it doesn’t know, but somehow, it definitely knows. Be right back.
Okay. 104 minutes and 66 points later (I walked nine holes of golf for 18 points of intense activity, 46 points of moderate activity, and two points of light; 7,607 steps, 672 calories burned; one instance of “dismissive, uncomfortable, or stubborn” vocal tone which I expressed after shanking my first tee shot, plus an “affectionate, satisfied, or appreciative” vocal tone from after I saved par on the fifth hole), I’m back, and I can now talk more about the Amazon Halo without a film of guilt coating the entire surface of my body. At this point, we as a society have given up on any meaningful sense of privacy and for the most part, we think this is totally okay. It only matters when we’re reminded that giving up so much can have strange and sometimes dire consequences. It’s convenient for me that a host of random websites and apps have direct access to my credit card information or my bank details; I only care when one of them gets hacked and I suddenly get a call from my bank asking if I just bought five chainsaws from a Home Depot in Albany. But just because this doesn’t usually happen doesn’t mean that ceding custody over what was once closely held personal information isn’t a bad idea.
In a way, the Amazon Halo is perhaps best understood not as a device to improve your health and well-being and instead as a great work of unintentional performance art that takes the quiet parts of what’s horrible about our networked present and screams them through a megaphone. Its entire point is to observe us and tell us that we’re fatter and angrier and lazier than we actually are, to score us on metrics determined by others, and to use the quietly brutal rhetorical tool of “just offering suggestions” to shame us into becoming skinnier, cheerier, and more engaged. This is basically what the internet does to us every day, and it’s sort of thrilling that Amazon somehow thought it was a good idea to make a device that put all of this on a billboard.
On the other hand, I’m convinced that the reason there’s a $16 billion market for fitness trackers in North America is not because we’re all psychotically fit athletes who need to understand every single facet of our physical performance in order to succeed—though those people do exist, and they should consider buying a Whoop strap, which Amazon seems to have ripped off for the look and better features of the Halo—but instead because we live in an aspirational society. We want to be fit, just like we want to own a house, work a creatively fulfilling job, and think of ourselves as “middle class” no matter what our bank balance says. I suspect that people buy fitness bands because they hope wearing one will hold them accountable in a way that simply buying a pair of running shoes will not. It’s a fitness tracker’s job to tell you how much of a slob you really are, and to suggest ways to ameliorate that slobbishness. In order to do that, your fitness tracker needs data. And most of the time, we’re all too eager to provide it.
What Amazon got wrong with the Halo, I think, is not its specific data practices—there are lots of disclaimers and at least one white paper that detail how data from the band gets anonymized. The biggest problems with this surveillance, though, aren’t individual. In the eyes of a company like Amazon, we’re not that special. The real threat of the data-driven internet economy isn’t being having your bank account cracked open by a Moldovian scammer or whatever, the threat is that companies can gather enough information from enough people that, based on our demographics alone, they can make an educated-ish guess about who we are and what we’re like that they can successfully sell us enough things or ideas enough of the time that they remain profitable, powerful, or both. This relatively-simple targeting works well enough that it can give the sensation of being personally spied on even if the legal documents promise you’re not.
For example, the other day I logged into the Amazon app because I was bored (this is a personal problem and I’m working on it, I promise), and was informed that there was a “Deal of the Day” running for one of those under-the-desk elliptical thingamajigs. I’m a 31-year-old man who is in moderately good physical condition and I occasionally buy things on Amazon to maintain that moderately good physical condition, and the fact that Amazon knows I own a Halo means that the company can make a good guess that I am willing to buy goofy fitness bullshit—you don’t need three weeks of heart-rate data to do that. It doesn't, however, make wearing a bracelet that gives up that heart-rate data feel any better.
Ultimately, the Amazon Halo is a fairly well-made fitness tracker whose distinguishing features are creepy enough to inspire an indistinct sense of dread while it's on your wrist. Was I served a deal of the day for an under-the-desk elliptical because Amazon doesn’t think I’m active enough for a real elliptical? Was it because Amazon knows I’m a cheap bastard? Does Amazon know I’m writing this? I just told my Halo that I was writing an article about it, and it told me I sounded, “Skeptical, confused, or uncomfortable.” If nothing else, they got that right.
The NBA and the PGA have bought in. Researchers are excited. But the tech is still in its earliest stages.
Originally Appeared on GQ
