How To Turn Off Health App On Iphone

My sister told me that my iPhone is now tracking all sorts of data about my health and activity through HealthKit. That's scary! How do I turn all of it off?

You raise a really interesting question about privacy with your question, one that's critical at this juncture in the evolution of consumer electronics: do you have control over the data that the device is collecting, and can you turn it off? Some things you can't turn off on your iPhone, like the location tracking feature, because that's critical for the cellular network to identify where your phone is at any given time. Does that make you trackable? Most likely, but hopefully only to law enforcement with a legitimate warrant from the courts.

Since we carry these devices with us all the time, they're also naturals for collecting additional biometric data. How often do you stand up? How much do you walk around? How far do you drive on a typical day? Throw in a wearable like the Apple Watch or Fitbit and you have even more data about heart rates, exercise frequency, sleep patterns and more. It's not a leap to imagine a health insurance policy that offers a discount to people who wear a tracker and can prove they really do exercise every single day.

Which leads us back to the Apple iPhone 6 Plus, or whatever specific iPhone you have. Turns out that there are two ways that the phone might be collecting biometric data, through its own sensors and by having the data reported from an external motion or fitness tracker like the Nike Fuelband, Jawbone Up or, yes, Apple Watch.

But you can't turn it off from the Health app itself, surprisingly. What you can ascertain from the app, however, is what devices are known and able to collect the data.

When I tap on the "Health" app — it's a big red heart icon — then on "Sources" along the bottom, here's what I see:

healthkit health data sources apple iphone ios 8

Tap on "Dave's Apple Watch", however, and it tells me where to disable the feature, but won't let me disable it directly in the app itself:

how to disable turn off health tracking ios8 iphone 5s

So let's do what it suggests. Go to the "Settings" app and look for the "Privacy" option:

look for privacy settings within the ios Settings app

Go into Privacy and you'll see there are a lot of things you should be paying attention to if you really do want to try and retain at least a modicum of privacy with your device:

settings > privacy in ios8 iphone 6

If you're logical in your problem solving approach like I am, you'll immediately say "Aha!" and tap on the "Health" option.

Turns out that's not where ya want to go, as is immediately obvious:

settings > privacy > health

Well, heck.

Instead, go back and tap on "Motion & Fitness" to get to where you can disable data sources:

motion and fitness options within privacy ios8

There ya go. You can disable one or both of them by simply sliding the white circles to cover up the green area. If you've done it right, it'll end up looking like this:

fitness tracking health disabled ios 8