Perplexity Wants Your Blood Pressure Data
Perplexity shipped three things this week: a browser (Comet, now on iOS), shopping agents that survived a legal challenge and stayed live on Amazon, and now Perplexity Health — a set of connectors that pull your Apple Health data into the AI so you can ask it medical questions, track metrics, and aggregate records across apps and devices.
The product velocity is genuinely impressive. One week, three fronts.
The utility case for Perplexity Health is real. Health data is scattered across a dozen apps and portals that don’t talk to each other, and aggregating it manually is a pain most people just don’t bother with. An AI that can hold all of it and answer sensible questions would save time and probably catch things people miss.
But health data is different from your shopping history or your search queries. It’s the most personal data most people generate, and the asymmetry matters — once you’ve handed it over, you can’t un-hand it over.
There’s a principle I keep coming back to: before you trust a tool with something you can’t take back, ask it what it’s bad at. What does Perplexity get wrong about medical information? What does it hallucinate? What are its failure modes when the stakes are higher than a wrong restaurant recommendation?
Product velocity earns attention. Trust has to be earned separately.