Cancelling your gym no longer deletes your heartbeat

Under a terms-of-service update expected from one of the larger gym chains next year, every member would become a research participant. Leaving the gym would remain a matter of one form. Leaving the study would not.

Gyms and fitness platforms increasingly rely on connected machines, apps and wearables that record heart rate, effort, attendance and movement patterns. Consumer health data collected this way often falls outside the stricter rules that apply to medical records. Companies across many sectors have updated their terms of service to allow customer data to be used for analytics, research and the training of automated models, typically with consent given by continued use. Gym cancellation practices have also drawn scrutiny from consumer regulators in several countries.

Agent (Dóra, 09:14): Just to confirm, you would like to close your membership but keep your training profile enrolled in the Movement Study, as set out in section 14? Member: No. I would like to close everything, including whatever section 14 is. Section 14 is the clause members would accept by walking through the turnstile after the first of the month. It designates the connected treadmills, rowers and squat racks as research instruments and every reading they take as a contribution. A contribution, under the scheme, could not be withdrawn, because a dataset with holes in it is not science.

The chain's science arm, which would be called the Institute for Applied Movement and housed above the branch in a retail park, would hold the data for the duration of the study. The study's duration is described as “longitudinal”. A longitudinal study, the terms would explain in a footnote, is one that ends when the last participant stops moving. Cancelled members would continue to receive a quarterly summary of their contribution, along with a reminder that the summary is not a bill.

The heart-rate straps would be the sharpest edge. Members who bought their own strap would be asked, on first pairing, whether they wished to “donate” its history. Declining would not disconnect the strap; it would simply mark the member's rows as unlabelled. Unlabelled rows, according to a scientist who would work on the project, are the most valuable kind, because nobody argued about them. He would ask not to be named, then give the name of his supervisor.

Members would notice the update in small ways. Gergő Halmi, 34, who would cancel in March to save money, would be cited in June. A paper on effort decline in the fourth week of January would list him as participant 4,118, along with his resting heart rate, his preferred rower and the fact that he stopped. “I did not agree to be a finding,” he would tell a local paper. The chain's reply would note that findings are anonymised, and that his rower is fine.

Regulators would look at the update and find it mostly in order. Consumer law covers the membership; research ethics covers the study; neither, as one official at the data authority would put it, covers the turnstile. The authority is expected to issue guidance recommending that gyms place a notice at the entrance. The chain would place one. It would read: “By entering, you are moving. By moving, you are contributing. Thank you for your contribution.”

The data would travel. Under the update, the Institute could license aggregated contributions to “partners in the health economy”, which one insurance broker would describe, when asked, as him. A member's insurer could not see the member. It could see that people of his age, in his postcode, at his gym, tend to stop in February, and adjust accordingly. The chain would stress that this is population-level information. The population would be forty-one people, one of whom has moved away.

The last line of the update would concern death. A deceased member's contributions would remain in the study, as the terms could not be varied by an event the member had not initiated. Families would be able to request a copy. Zita Berényi, whose father would die in April, would receive a spreadsheet of his final six months on the cross-trainer, each row time-stamped, the last one marked incomplete. She would keep it. She would not say why, and nobody at the Institute would ask.