Never owned an AW but considering one. Looking at AW SE. The Apple Watch is designed with a strong emphasis on fitness and health features - in which I’m not interested at all. I would use AW for notifications and communication and that sort of stuff. Is it possible (and how easy?) to disable all fitness and health related stuff, deny sensors to measure me, remove related apps, etc? Or is that stuff too heavily integrated in AW?
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Disabling all fitness and health related stuff
- Thread starter Sami13496
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Haven't tried but you can not consent to the data collection (from memory) which would make it all moot.
You can turn off notifications for activity, etc. which would mean it doesn't bug you to stand/go exercise, etc.
It will still use the sensors for crash detection most likely however but won't report it back.
That said, as someone who wasn't interested specifically in the health stuff before owning one, I've left it turned on and it has been quite interesting to learn things about my body vs. what I eat/drink and level of activity.
But if you're against the data collection, I get it - see above.
its quite easy to do
using the Watch app on iPhone:
go to Privacy tab.
There you can turn off a lot (most?) Health and Fitness tracking. All of the following:
Heart Rate
Blood Oxygen (if you have a model that has that feature)
Wrist Temperature (if you have a model that has that feature)
Respiratory Rate
Time in Daylight
Environmental Sound Measurements
Headphone Audio Measurements
Fitness Tracking
In same app, go to Sleep section and
click "Dont use this Watch for Sleep"
there might be more, but the above are a good start.
There's no gatekeeper either. Apple doesn't make you look at that stuff ("You can't see the time because you didn't check your fitness information"). You can ignore the stuff you don't need too.
I’m still considering purchasing the Apple Watch SE, and I received great answers from you last time—thank you for that! I just wanted to ask one more thing: if I disable all health and fitness-related features on the watch, will it stop tracking me completely? I specifically do not want the watch to measure me in any way.
for health and fitness: i think that would be correct. if you turn off all of the features i mentioned a few posts ago.
"tracking": kind of wondering if by tracking you also might be meaning locations, or any other "recording of your activity" : if you mean that, then i think you need to use a different watch than apple's. for example: if you want to get notifications, the main, primary feature of your watch is that apple knows exactly where you are by your just having that watch on your wrist.
it may not be tracking location if you set it accordingly, but it knows you have the watch on, and are not currently using your iPhone, for example, so it routes notifications to your watch. i think that if you mean these kinds of things, then the apple watch is not best for you.
your use-case scenario and the profile for whom the watch is intended is quite different.
"for communications and notifications": the SE should be ideal and enough. but it still knows alot about your movements and general usage. other than that, yes, you can turn off health "measurements" .
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Yes, this exactly. For instance, the watch has a gyroscope and accelerometer, that monitor your arm/body movements. For some functions, this is necessary -- for instance, when you raise your wrist, the watch goes from standby to active mode, making the screen brighter, turning on the second hand movement on watch faces that have them, etc. To do this, it has to measure your arm movements. So if you don't want it to measure you at all, this wouldn't work. There may be many other functions like this -- I just don't know because I never think about it.
Oh, another thing is lock/unlock. The watch can be set to unlock when it detects a heartbeat. You can disable that and lock/unlock it with a passcode, but then you have to peck at the small screen every time you put on your watch. But if you don't want it to measure your heartbeat, you are left with manually entering the passcode.
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Just really curious now… why get a Smartwatch in the first place if you don’t intend to use its potential?