Ōura Ring customers for weeks have posted on social media urging others to dump the health tracker over concerns about its ties to Palantir and the Defense Department, but its CEO insists customer data is safe.
After a flurry of TikTok posts called out the company for allegedly infringing on customer privacy, Ōura CEO Tom Hale said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week, the rumors are “totally overblown.”
While the Department of Defense is the company’s largest enterprise customer, Hale said it doesn’t have access to customer data. As for its supposed partnership with Palantir, the software and analytics company cofounded by Republican donor and tech mogul Peter Thiel, Hale said its systems aren’t connected to Ōura’s, despite a small commercial relationship with the company.
“We will never sell your data to anyone, ever,” Hale said.
Hale’s reassurances echo previous comments in which he stressed that in response to user privacy concerns, especially around women tracking their menstrual cycles, the company added a feature to the Ōura Ring allowing users to selectively delete their data.
Hale also previously noted Ōura is bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which protects the privacy of medical data but also allows the federal government to request access for legal or public health reasons—a caveat that has become a major concern for women following the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Ōura did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The most recent controversy started with a press release Ōura published on Aug. 27 in which it announced a manufacturing facility in Fort Worth, Texas, to support the Defense Department. Deep in the press release the company mentioned a tie-up with Palantir’s FedStart platform to support “population-level analysis of risk and readiness.”
Cue the conspiracies. On TikTok, users seized upon the “population-level” language to accuse the company of handing customer data over to the government via Palantir’s technology.
The aversion to Ōura’s relationship to Palantir comes as the analytics company has been criticized for its contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Palantir has worked with the agency for years but amid President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation efforts, the firm was awarded a $30 million contract in April to help ICE track and oversee its deportation machine.
Yet, FedStart, the Palantir program Ōura mentioned in the press release, is a software-as-a-service that helps companies cut back on potentially years of accreditation work needed before deploying software to the federal government, and has little to do with the company’s consumer business.
Through FedStart, companies can access Palantir’s already accredited environment and benefit from compliance with “Impact Level 5” security, which the DoD requires for cloud providers to protect sensitive national security information.
The Ōura CEO noted this week that this is the company’s only relationship with Palantir.
“That relationship became blown into a massive partnership with Palantir,” Hale said.
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