How to manage (and delete) your health data collected by Android. Your Android smartphone also collects sports and health data. Here’s how it all works.
When it comes to tracking your health and fitness data, smartwatches and other wearables often come to mind first. It turns out that your smartphone Android also keeps an eye on some of your data, even without you necessarily being aware of it.
Apps like Google Fit and Samsung Health can count your steps, active minutes, calories burned, and more in the background as you use your phone every day, and this data can even be shared with other health and fitness apps on your device.
Sure, all of this can be useful for tracking your daily routines and health, but it’s important to be aware of what’s being collected and where it’s being stored. Better yet, it only takes a few minutes to conduct an audit of the situation.
Google Fit has been using the underlying technology called Health Connect for some time now, which manages everything locally on your smartphone and keeps the data fully encrypted: no one but you can access this data, unless that other person can unlock your device, and this applies to all the apps with which you want to use the Health Connect standard.
Google Fit syncs data to the cloud for backup, but it’s not end-to-end encrypted. That means Google’s standard safeguards are in place, but someone at Google could technically see your data if they wanted to. The same goes for many Google services, including Gmail: you’re trusting the company to keep your data safe.
The story is very similar with Samsung Health. By default, the data is stored on your phone and encrypted using the South Korean giant’s own technology Knox. You also have the option to save everything in the cloud, to take advantage of synchronization. However, by default, there is no end-to-end encryption either. The protection is there, of course, but there is still a risk factor.
That said, Samsung recently introduced an Enhanced Data Protection mode for files stored in Samsung Cloud, including those synced from Samsung Health. This means that data in the cloud will be fully encrypted and inaccessible to a third party, but for now, only the Samsung Galaxy S24 series has it.
Check health data tracking
Open Google Fit on your Android smartphone and you’ll get an overview of all the health and fitness data currently being tracked by your device: most commonly seen are steps, energy expended, and heart rate points (which measure your daily routines), which are the types of data collected by default.
Any of this data can be deleted, from the Profile tab. Tap the gear icon, then “Delete your data.” The next screen lets you delete data from specific categories or clear everything. To delete a specific item, such as an activity, select it in the Log screen, then tap the three dots (top right) and Delete.
To stop Google Fit from tracking this or that, or from sharing data with other apps, open the Profile tab, tap the gear icon (top right), then Manage connected apps. Data and access lets you manage by data category.
For example, to stop Google Fit from counting your daily steps, go to Data & access > Activity > Steps > Fit. There, turn off the Steps slider and that’s it. The same screen lists the different types of data Google Fit can track if you want it to, and the same goes if you select another app.
If you have a Samsung Galaxy device and Samsung Health, there are a few differences. You can select a data type, like steps, and tap the three dots (top right) to stop recording that type of data. To clear everything, go to the Home tab, then tap the three dots and choose Settings and Clear personal data.
In this same Settings page, you can access Health Connect, which works similarly to Google Fit: you can manage which apps (including Samsung Health) have access to the data collected by your phone’s sensors, dive into the different categories of data tracked, and choose which apps and connected devices (like smartwatches) can communicate their data to Samsung Health.
