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.
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 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.
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.
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.
