This is why I buy my grandmother her electronics. I can set it up so she has it ready when she gets it and doesn’t need to do anything.
Of course it’s also super easy to get her phone. Just tell her I need to do updates and then take it to another room to transfer everything.
My mom bought her an iPad 2 years ago. “I got a good deal. It was only $200” made me gag. Ya, my grandma uses apple cause it’s easiest but buying the cheapest apple product will not be a good time. She likes the iPad but it’s a 16g base iPad and the keyboard case she bought her is not a good fit. It requires a key combination to pair EVERY time since it doesn’t maintain a list of paired devices. And my grandma can only have 3 apps on her tablet before it’s full. So this year I’m getting her a new iPad with a decent chunk of storage which should last her a decade since she only emails and plays card games.
Apple has very explicitly stated in very clear terms that the health app does not share data with other apps or devices unless you give permission. And as someone who has given that permission (twice, once to give a meal tracker write permission and once to link to my doctors office’s application for read and write) it’s for every application. It’s not a “hey you need to let everyone have access or no one”. You can get fairly granular.
There’s always the possibility of lying but usually when a company goes that hard on saying the same thing is so many different ways it’s legit. They don’t commit like that unless they know they won’t get in trouble. Those kinds of statements could open them to false advertising claims if it got out they were taking your health data.
Here’s a link to their privacy document which reviewed a good bit of info: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Health_Privacy_White_Paper_May_2023.pdf