Your heart rate. Your hormone levels. Your sleep cycle. Your location. All of it streaming off your wrist every five minutes.
The question isn't "who's watching?" The better question is "who's buying?"
Meet Delphi
The federal government has a new program called Delphi.
The irony of that name will become clear in a moment.
Delphi is funded through ARPA-H – the advanced research agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services.
The program aims to develop biosensors that go far beyond anything on the market. This isn't just step counts and sleep scores. These devices will monitor hormones and cytokines, the chemical signals your body produces when fighting infection. They'll also monitor your stress level, your response to a drug, or whether you're pregnant.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants every American to wear one within four years.
He called it one of the largest advertising campaigns in HHS history.
You'll be funding that campaign, even if you didn't vote on it.
That's bad. But what comes next is alarming.
Delphi Meets You
Most people assume HIPAA protects their health data.
But HIPAA only covers data generated inside a doctor-patient relationship. Everything streaming off your wrist is legally available to data brokers, insurers, employers, and even law enforcement.
That's not someday. It's already happening. Law enforcement agencies are purchasing commercial wearable data to track people's locations.
Which brings us back to the ironic name…
Delphi was an ancient Greek temple. Above its entrance, three words were inscribed: Know Thyself.
The name is an invitation to self-knowledge. But once this program is running, that phrase gets inverted. The data brokers know you. The insurers know you. Your employer knows you. Law enforcement knows you. Like Santa Claus... They'll know when you're sleeping, they'll know when you're awake, they'll know when you've been bad or good.
The watch might help with your health. But the people buying your data have different plans.
The same signal that detects a health problem early might also deny you insurance, flag you for investigation, or price you out of a job. You improved yourself. But they profited, perhaps even at your expense.
That's not a policy disagreement. That's a violation of something more fundamental.
For any exchange to be genuinely voluntary, three things must be true. You must know what you're trading. You must know who is buying it. You must have the free ability to say no.
Genuine consent requires all three. Delphi offers none of them.
Your biological data is your property. When it's routed into markets you didn't authorize, purchased by buyers you don't know, used in ways you never agreed to, that isn't a privacy concern...
That's theft.
Does that make you happy?
Democracy of One
Consider what the private market is already doing without any HHS backing.
The global wearables market was valued at $43 billion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $168 billion by 2030. People are buying these devices because they want the insights. Voluntary transactions. The market is working exactly as it should.
When you choose to buy something, the provider has to keep earning your business.
If a company misuses your data, you cut off the watch.
That feedback loop works because your participation must be earned.
Federal funding breaks that loop. You pay whether the program serves you or not. The provider no longer answers to you. They answer to whoever controls the program.
That's the difference between a service and a conscription.
Buying a wearable (or not) is already a vote. Not a vote you share with three hundred million strangers. It's a democracy of one. Your money. Your body. Your decision.
The wearables market has to convince you. It cannot compel you.
Delphi skips that conversation entirely.
Theft, Twice Over
The Natural Principle of Human Respect holds that theft always diminishes happiness, harmony, and prosperity. And Delphi is theft, twice over.
First: Taxation to fund something you never agreed to is theft.
The wearables industry can and already does its own research, marketing, and customer service. Every consumer votes with their dollars. That system works.
Delphi doesn't accelerate it. It bypasses it.
Second: Routing your most intimate biological data into markets you can't control is theft of something that belongs to you alone.
If Delphi helps you know yourself, fine. But if it helps a cast of thousands, including the government, know you better than you know yourself, without your consent, that's not a health program. That's a surveillance apparatus dressed in a wellness brand.
You could and would feel more secure if the people working in government didn't have the power to treat you like data, selling you off to entire industries.
When Human Respect guides us instead of government, your body and your data belong to you.