You can make this argument about literally anything. Should your tires contain GPS trackers and share that info with their manufacturer on the off chance that you sped, drove on the wrong surface, or there was a manufacturing defect that could possibly lead to an accident?

This shit needs to stop. It's getting out of hand fast. In just a few years, literally every powered device we own will be logging video, sound, location, and network traffic in real time continuously. What's to stop equifax from leveraging all this new info for credit reports? Insurance companies for premiums? Lawyers for civil defense? Class action lawsuits? Police? Divorce proceedings?

We are not heading in a good direction here. A police state is bad in and of itself, but swapping the police with a "free and unregulated market" is infinitely worse.

I mostly agree with you, but at the same time, we are far from a "free and unregulated market." There are mountains of regulations to comply with, and more than one startup idea I've had to disrupt this type of shit never got off the ground because I would have had to spend months of my time just reading rules or hiring extremely expensive consultants.

I think the problem is not necessarily lack of regulation (although there are consumer protection/privacy rules that we badly need), it's that the big companies are the ones writing the regulation and conveniently it makes it really hard for anyone to disrupt or challenge them.

Are we still talking about tracking and sharing of user data? Because from I can tell, outside of very specific pii situations, it is largely unregulated today.

Ah fair point, I seem to have broadened the scope in my mind. Just tracking and sharing of user data in general, so long as you aren't trying to do business with entities that are regulated, is pretty wide open in most states in the US.

They don't do any of those things (at least not for me; there's a sibling reply where someone was harassed for non-compliance). If I don't use the device, no one contacts me. I lost power a few times and couldn't use it; I pulled a couple all-nighters over the years; I left it behind on a weekend trip once; I had a stretch of sleeping problems where I didn't sleep more than a couple hours a night for a week; I adjusted the device outside the doctor's parameters; I had innumerable problems with poor mask fit/leaks. All these metrics were broadcast by the CPAP, and all would have been a concern of my doctor, but it's got nothing to do with patient health. This is all about gathering evidence to deny future care, whether it be new equipment or coverage for more extreme situations related to non-compliance.

That would depend on your agreement with the device manufacturer, assuming you had one.

The products I worked on that had remote monitoring built-in were purchased directly by hospitals or medical labs and in those cases we did have contracts that specified what we would do with the data. IIRC, one of the agreements was that if we (the manufacturer) noted that the device was malfunctioning, we would alert them.

Without an agreement to do something with the data, you'd have a hard time making a case. Especially since without an agreement, they wouldn't be able to access your identifying information.