Let’s just say the quiet part out loud: most of the fancy “health tech” you’re being sold isn’t about helping you become healthier. It’s about turning your biology into a product.
Your steps. Your heart rhythms. Your sleep cycles. Your glucose spikes. Your menstrual patterns. Your stress responses. Your location. Your habits. Your decisions. Your vulnerabilities. All of it is being turned into a digital version of you that companies can study, package, sell, and use to predict what you’ll do next.
And no — they’re not doing it because they care about your well-being. They’re doing it because your biology has become a goldmine.
The Sales Pitch Is Empowerment — The Business Model Is Extraction
Health tech loves to tell you that you’re “taking control” by tracking everything. But let’s be real: handing over your inner world to a corporation is not sovereignty. It’s outsourcing your intuition to a device that profits when you feel dependent on it.
The entire ecosystem is built on one strategy: make you believe you need constant monitoring in order to be healthy.
And while you’re getting daily “insights,” these companies are getting something far more valuable — a detailed map of your behavior, your physiology, and your potential future illnesses.
If you read my post on the nervous system, Why the Nervous System Isn’t the Side Show — It’s the Main Event, you already know that the system loves to label your natural biological responses as “dysfunction.” Tech companies use that same trick — but now they’re doing it in real time, on your wrist, in your pocket, while you sleep.
Your Body Has Become a Marketplace
Once your data is captured, it doesn’t just sit in a pretty dashboard. It enters an enormous marketplace you never agreed to participate in.
Wearable companies, fertility apps, symptom trackers, “smart” devices, and insurance-connected wellness programs all share, sell, and repurpose your data to:
- predict which illnesses you’re likely to develop,
- estimate which medications you’ll be prescribed,
- calculate your “risk score” for insurers, and
- build behavior models that determine how and when to sell to you.
This is not “health innovation.” This is the #SicknessEconomy expanding its surveillance net. And because the interface looks clean and modern, we’re supposed to smile and call it “progress.”
Meanwhile, your biological life is being used to make other people rich.
The Bait Is Convenience — The Hook Is Surveillance
Most people don’t willingly give up sovereignty. They give it up because the trade-off looks harmless.
- “A free DNA health report? Sure.”
- “A cheaper insurance premium for wearing a tracker? Why not.”
- “A period app that predicts fertility windows? That sounds helpful.”
- “A sleep score? Okay, that’s cool.”
But behind the scenes, these tools are building a profile so detailed it can reveal more about your health than your doctor knows — and definitely more than you ever consented to share.
It’s the same pattern I talked about in Reclaiming Your Gut: The Sovereignty of Your Second Brain: industries create the very problems they claim to solve — then monetize your desperation.
Tech works the same way. The more uncertain, anxious, or “broken” you feel, the more dependent you become on the very devices that caused the anxiety in the first place.
The Real Danger Isn’t the Data — It’s the Interpretation
Even if we pretended these companies collected data ethically (they don’t), the bigger danger is how the data gets interpreted.
Algorithms are making decisions about your “health status,” your “risk level,” your reproductive patterns, your emotional stability, your stress load, and your predicted future — without any understanding of your real life, your context, your body, or your intuition.
These systems are marketed as objective science. But algorithms are written by humans — humans with biases, contracts, shareholders, and profit goals.
When a device tells you your sleep is terrible, or your fertility window is “out of range,” or your stress score is red, it’s not giving you truth. It’s giving you an interpretation designed to keep you using the device.
The Sovereignty Question No One Wants to Ask
Here’s the question the Sickness Economy hopes you never think about:
Why does a corporation deserve more access to your biology than you do?
Your body is not a subscription. Your biology isn’t Big Tech’s playground. You do not owe anyone your rhythms, your patterns, your sleep cycles, your heartbeats, or your deepest vulnerabilities.
And you absolutely do not owe anyone the opportunity to turn your life into a data set.
So How Do You Actually Protect Yourself?
You don’t need to burn your phone or smash your smartwatch. Sovereignty is not extremism — it’s awareness.
- Turn off app permissions you don’t need. If it doesn’t need your mic or camera, don’t give it access.
- Stop linking health apps to insurance portals. That pipeline was built for one reason: profit.
- Be suspicious of “free.” If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
- Choose analog when it matters. Your body doesn’t need a dashboard to heal.
- Use tech as a tool, not an authority. It can support you, but it should never override your intuition.
The moment you stop worshiping the data and start listening to your body, everything changes. The system loses its leverage. And you reclaim something priceless — the right to live as a human being, not a monitored data stream.
Next Week on Why Wednesday…
Coming up next Wednesday: “Why Overwhelm Is a Design, Not a Flaw.”
We’ll talk about why it’s not an accident that you feel stretched thin, behind, and too tired to think straight — and how chronic overwhelm quietly keeps the Sickness Economy running.
With love and truth,
—Donna 💚
Sources & Studies Mentioned
- Doherty C, et al. “Privacy in consumer wearable technologies: a living review of privacy policies of leading device manufacturers.” J Am Med Inform Assoc, 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12167361/
- Zhang B, et al. “A survey on security and privacy issues in wearable health devices.” Computers & Security, 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167404825001427
- Mozilla Foundation. “Every Breath You Take, Every Move You Make: The Hidden Costs of a $500B Market Centered on Our Bodies.” 2024. https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/every-breath-you-take-every-move-you-make-the-hidden-costs-of-a-500b-market-centered-on-our-bodies/
- Electronic Privacy Information Center. “A Health Privacy ‘Check-Up.’” 2025. https://epic.org/a-health-privacy-check-up-how-unfair-modern-business-practices-can-leave-you-under-informed-and-your-most-sensitive-data-ripe-for-collection-and-sale/
- Federal Trade Commission. “Health Privacy.” 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-security/health-privacy
- Ratwani RM. “Addressing AI Algorithmic Bias in Health Care.” JAMA, 2024. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2823006
- King’s College London. “Female health apps misuse highly sensitive data, study finds.” 2024. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/female-health-apps-misuse-highly-sensitive-data-study-finds
Links were accessed and verified at the time of writing.
