Take a handful of tweets that share an opinion and write an article that makes it seem like there's a mass exodus.
It's ok, you don't need anything more than a handful of tweets to back your claim.
Yes, some people are privacy conscious and are going to stop using Fitbit but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few?
Who knows. I'm sure author has no clue but that won't stop them from writing this empty article.
Many companies are selling data not because it’s significant revenue, but rather because they have no reason to leave money on the table. This kind of small scale boycott may actually be meaningful for those internal decisions, which IMO is interesting.
I only know two people who use Fitbits, and both of them have ditched them.
I agree that the number of people doing this is likely small, but such people certainly do exist, and they aren't incredibly rare.
As far as I can see, there are many good uses of this data (some potentially profitable, such as selling to health insurance companies so they can better price their products and evaluate risks) and very few bad uses of this data.
Can someone please clarify for me exactly what the potential harm is here... using evidence and reason instead of conjecture and belief? Because until then, this all smells an awful lot like a conspiracy theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
Here's an example: Google has had our data for literally decades now. What is the measurable, significant harm that has resulted? And if there is nothing, what catastrophes are yet possible where a single or group of rogue bad actors profit off the suffering of many and get away with it?
Please explain to me my naiveté here.
There's nothing wrong with reporting that a small number of people are publicly announcing that they're binning their Fitbit devices. They are, and they weren't before, so that's news. Are you suggesting there should be threshold an event should have to pass before it becomes newsworthy? Who would decide what that threshold is?
This specific incident is surely rather harmless, but I wonder if the same can be said about this type of thing.
>> ...but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few? Who knows. I'm sure <X> has no clue but that won't stop them from writing <Y>.
I feel like it would be improvement if individuals and overall society (especially thoughts leaders) considered the potential importance of this general idea. I have a speculative armchair theory that the incredible changes in the amount and style of information (news, memes, forum discussions) people consume due to the introduction of the internet and 24 hour cable news is doing something to humans on a deep psychological basis, that it may be significantly altering our heuristics in a historically abnormal way, resulting in a large amount of incorrect perceptions and negative behaviors.
Is this really happening, might there be some truth to this, could some people be truly affected by this? A lot? A few? Who knows. But if it is happening, to a degree that is non-negligible, and nobody notices, how damaging might the effects be? Could this, say, affect how people treat others on a daily basis? Might it play a role in how they vote in elections, or make personal decisions on various public policy matters? To me, these seem like questions worth considering.
0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
And I will add that in the last year of owning a Fitbit ionic I wasn't syncing anyway because there was some sort of bug that would randomly subtract 100 or so calories every hour or so. Fitbit continued to deny the bug existed and it was never fixed.
Google feels like a spouse who cheated on you. You don’t trust them but you haven’t found a better option yet. I can’t imagine that helps them competitively in the long run.
This is a great analogy! It's crazy how much my opinion of Google has changed in the past decade or so. Judging by comments on HackerNews and elsewhere, many others feel the same.
I also feel similarly about Amazon. I enjoy using it less and less, but it's been hard to completely drop.
I still have a Google account (in fact several) but I hardly ever log in. I use it when I have to for work, but if I have any choice I use Microsoft Office instead of Google docs. Mainly I use JIRA, Slack, and tools from other vendors.
I use Fastmail and EM Client for my personal mail. You get what you (do or don't) pay for.
I have a Fitbit Alta HR, mainly because it is smaller than a conventional watch. I am not going to get rid of it, but I am certainly not going to replace it with a Google product. I probably won't be able to anyway since Google will probably kill it in a fit of mindlessness soon.
My first guess would be "as data breaches and abuses hit the news, people are more skeptical of wearable trackers in general". I've heard several people talk about getting hit by the MyFitnessPal security breach or Strava revealing army bases; it seems entirely possible that if there's a trend in these anecdotes it's not brand-specific.
Even if Fitbit is being hit especially hard, my first guess would be that it's as much about buggy connectivity and battery issues as anything else. Even if it's not a conscious evaluation, people do sacrifice privacy based on the actual value they're getting, and Fitbit has been a bit infamous for quality issues recently. (And is that a trend or just bored writers turning an example into a narrative? No idea, but it still affects Fitbit's perception.)
There are two whole schools of vacuous articles like this: either pick anecdotes and push them as a trend, or pick a broad statistical trend and narrow the focus to a group/brand which supports a narrative.
I know there was more to it than this but anytime there was a meeting where execs or product owners wanted to flex they would just grab a bunch of fanatical tweets about how great the launch/new product is, as though that proved it was a good launch.
Well that's the press in 2019. Do no research at all, write clickbaity headlines, and maximize ads impressions. Content does not matter.
Well, at least this article doesn’t embed a few tweets, which is an immediate sign of garbage journalism.
Humans are terrible at quantifying these 'movements'. Even 50 people complaining about something can SEEM like a lot.
Our brains just aren't wired to do proper statistics first analysis on incoming data. Everyone is susceptible to this default mode of thinking, including journalists. I believe it's the cause of some of the crazy, anti-science movements that we're seeing in the last 10 years.
If this article was written in a more "honest" way then it might just be the author's opinions on what scary things Google could someday do with massive troves of health data.
This kind of nonsense is nothing new. It's been going on for ages.
You know those man-on-the-street news segments with people literally repeating the reporters words for a soundbite? It's the exact same thing.
I want a bumper sticker "burn fb,goo, etc to the ground"
I'm also replacing my Nest with an Ecobee soon now that they're forcing Google account migrations on everyone.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=cancel%20f...
I tried a bunch of different terms, but still, I see no evidence of any exodus of any kind.
If they were truly privacy conscious they wouldn't have a twitter anyway.
Direct messaging and protected tweets are a different story though, but your statement is objectively wrong.
What method would serve you better?
It is like asking a couple of random people if they know me, getting negative responses, and using them as the basis for an article about the mysterious Dave person who no one seems to know anything about.
This is how a certain demographic communicates in 2019. Twitter does not represent society as a whole.
Did these people even own Fitbits in the first place? Have they even been using them recently? How many have actually thrown them away?
It's representative of nothing.
Thanks HN.
Selecting colourful Twitter anecdotes and meshing them into prebaked narrative with a eye catching headline makes it click bait, not journalism.
>but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few?
No one knows except Google and fitbit. As it is, is exactly "some"and since a lot of fitbit owners don't tweet, precisely because they care about privacy, the actual number is almost definitely a multiple of the tweeters.
What word other than "some" should they have used?
Journalism is dead. It's honestly a shame.
If you want real news, there are plenty of places to find it.
Their internal privacy controls are extensive.
As a human, it is nearly impossible to access someone's data, even when debugging code/ML models/etc.
And when you do need to, it requires exhaustive oversight/approval, and _everything_ is audited.
Several years out, I no longer trust Google - not because I trust my former (immediate) coworkers less, but because the direction the entire advertising/data science industry is taking as a whole is deeply concerning to me. I disagree with almost all of it on principle, and am no longer comfortable supporting it by allowing unfettered collection of my personal data, regardless of who is doing the collecting or how much they promise not to sell my data.
(Companies were never "selling" data anyway - they were using it themselves, sharing it with their partners without an explicit sale, and otherwise doing things with it that I don't approve of which do not meet the strict definition of "sale".)
It makes me uncomfortable that the data is always there, and the direction of the business just needs to change. Perhaps they're not being profitable enough for wall street? And on a time scale of 10 more years, I'm sure there will be a number of "incidents" in which teams were given approval to use the data in unsavory ways.
I lean to agree that it's more of a shift in public perception of Big Data companies. And hurting Google even when it might be one of the better players.
2) Those data are never going away, and may not (=will not) belong to Google forever,
3) Data that exists can be demanded by the government, justly or otherwise, and they will get it—private companies running a dragnet spy operation on everyone is only marginally better than the government doing the same directly,
4) Targeted ads are adversarial. So are ads in general, really—yes I know they can be useful but I'm talking in general, and in practice—but it's definitely more off-putting to be spied on then have that information used against you.
5) Google's incentives suck, their ethics suck, and I don't trust one bit that they won't do all kinds of nasty shit with the data they've collected the moment that looks like it's best for their bottom line.
That may be true.
However, the quality of their internal controls has nothing to do with why I don't trust Google. I don't trust Google's official and company-sanctioned uses of my data.
The only problem is that if everything you say is actually true (it might only haven been true for you, or for a subset of folks working there), there is strictly no guarantee that it will last, especially now that all the people who did make Google into what is is culture-wise are long gone enjoying their [B|M]illions.
The next wave of leaders that are taking over have far less scruples and inherited a no-string-attached treasure chest (actually, a better analogy would be a amazingly well stocked armory) and will do with it whatever they damn please.
And what about "External privacy controls"?
I think that even fb devs can say such thing but...
The only unfortunate consequence is that Garmin's import service only imports very coarse data from your Fitbit export, so all detailed historic records are lost unless you manually dig through your Fitbit export files. I hope Garmin will still provide a 100% complete importer in the future.
There is a service I do like from https://tapiriik.com/ that will sync all your fitness data across a bunch of common fitness apps (it helps when all your friends want to link up for activities but nobody agrees on a single tracking platform). One of the sync options is just to directly download all the raw datafiles to dropbox which is pretty convenient.
If none of those sound good you could roll your own from the source code to tapiriik which is available here: https://github.com/cpfair/tapiriik . It does use some hacks to get around garmin not making all their APIs easy for personal development.
The FIT file format isn't fully documented (SDK has encumbrances and perhaps cost -- it's been a while since I checked).
Here are some of the tools I've used with Vivosmart HR and Fenix 3HR FIT files. They're not polished for easy usage, but they'll get a technically-skilled hacker started. The core is Kiyokazu Suto's 'fitdump' perl.
But it currently only imports coarse data, e.g. your average heartrate on a given day. Not the granular minute-by-minute information.
Sleep statistics currently aren't imported at all.
Google already knows what diagnoses people have, simply because people have been searching their symptoms. Remember when Google several years ago boasted about predicting epidemics faster than the health care system, based on searches?
UDPATE: Here is the reason: "And then, GFT failed—and failed spectacularly—missing at the peak of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent. When Google quietly euthanized the program, called Google Flu Trends (GFT), it turned the poster child of big data into the poster child of the foibles of big data. " [1]
[0] https://www.google.org/flutrends/about/
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-learn-epic-failure-google-...
>Google Flu Trends and Google Dengue Trends are no longer publishing current estimates
Can someone decode what this actually means? Was their estimate of flu cases 140 percent higher or lower than the actual amount (or maybe lazily meant "at 140 percent", so, estimate was 40 percent low), was the peak offset by 1.4 months (or 14 months??), something else?
People are really upset because google started acting politically. If they weren't concerned about Google's judgment they wouldn't be worried.
But they're right to worry.
An activity tracking device on your arm can't determine what medication you are taking or what diagnosis you have unless it has a secret microphone that is recording every conversation and uploading it for analysis, which is what the concern the person you replied to quoted.
There's the general and the specific.
Google is on a war path, but many prefer to stick their heads in the sand.
Once my Pebble Time dies, I think that's where I'm going.
The page says that it's 5 years away from release, though.
I have finally began moving off of gmail, once that is complete, I will be free.
The reports of people being locked out of Google because of youtube comments was the last straw. The first straw, I guess, was when they bought Nest, I turned off my Nest cams right then and never looked back.
edit: spelling
For real. There is not so much they can do and even less they can do properly
Read and send canned responses to texts. See who's calling me. Read emails. Check bus/train schedule.
Basically an extension of my phone. You can debate the "smart" label if you like, but the semantics don't really concern me.
Plus the convenience of knowing who’s calling without pulling my phone out, answer the call or text message directly from my Watch, check the temperature at a glance...
And it’s pretty good at telling time, too.
I like the concept but I think Fitbit doesn’t have enough data points to be really useful and then the execution is mediocre. Maybe google will be good for them but I think I’ll switch
The Blaze though has standard watch bands so you can replace it inexpensively with any type of watch band as long it's the right size.
"Several" say they are getting rid of the devices because of a lack of trust in Google. How many constitutes "several" is left for the reader to calculate. 27? 270? 2,700?
Poor journalism.
I struggle to see how this even is consistent with the spirit of the Fitbit terms-- the purchase of the company transfers ownership of user data, which Fitbit assured customers it would never do. Time for some common sense concerning this consumer-unfriendly trend.
I'm also not sure why a sudden distrust of Google over Fitbit. It's not like Fitbit wasn't in a position to misuse your data as well. Google is just better at it.
But you also don't want ads publicizing private health info to people who are nearby. Like, I don't want to sit down and watch "TV" at a friends house and have to wonder why I'm seeing ad after ad for valtrex.
However I am one of the ones trying to de-Google, so I’ll see how a data dump goes. Trying to find a device that toes the line between health tracker and smart watch as artfully as the Versa 1 does that isn’t produced by a monster Corp should be fun as well
But I think seeing how Nest turned out is a great reason for not wanting to buy a Fitbit after being bought my Google (forcing tighter integration to Google, depreciating APIs to make it useful for other integrations, no really new innovation).
Such a watch might be very difficult to obtain. Even by flashing existing Android Wear devices not only it requires several steps, but the unfortunate lack of apps might be a big turn-off for many people.
Either that or my money will be going to an Apple Watch.
Because at least you're not the product?
>"How do we use your personal data?
...
>Marketing, advertising and making recommendations[.] Your personal data may be used to offer surveys, competitions, discount coupons or events in which you are free to participate. We may provide you with information on our Products, such as new features, sales offers from Withings or our partners, or to announce new Products. You may opt out of marketing offers by logging into your Withings account and managing your notification preferences.
...
>Modification of the present Policy[.] Withings may modify the present Policy with or without previous notice, block the access to the website, or change its access conditions "
Will all due respect: eff that. As others have noted here and elsewhere, marketing and advertising -- especially that using my personal data -- is adversarial.
I paid for a thing, just let me have that thing.
And before anyone unhelpfully suggests, "they have an opt-out policy"... well, we all understand that once your intimate, valuable data is siphoned off your wrist, the horse has left the barn, right? That genie is out of the bottle, that bell has rung, and all kinds of other euphemisms that illustrate how the data is no longer in your control, and all the opt-outs in the world are not going to actually delete all your data. It's been forked to Utah, backed up, sharded, "anonymized" and combined with all the other data you've generated on devices sold by other companies -- for every single "partner" that paid them, as well as everyone who did not pay them, in the cases of Utah and corporate espionage.
An actual alternative would be a device that has no connectivity to my pocket surveillance slab or anything with an uncontrollable baseband processor, nor connectivity to the Internet generally. Let me be in actual control.
Thanks for the advice, but I'm sticking with my Casio dumbwatch. Doesn't peep on my daily activities, but it accurately tells time and I love that thing. Bonus is that I have to think about its battery only once a decade.
Sure they may store my personal data and I would prefer if they didn't sell it to any third party. I would also prefer a product which can store information locally on the phone but never sync it to the "cloud".
The thing is, there is no such products because people are stupid and would be furious if they switch phones and their data was lost on them because they didn't understand that the data was only stored locally and never left the device.
I would buy such a product, if it existed, but it don't AFAIK. Fitbit stored the same amount of data as Withings do, it's just because Google bought them that people are worried.
Withings is basically a rival to Fitbit and since you don't want the data to ever leave your wrist, this sort of product is clearly not for you.
Source: first-hand contact with Fitbit users in the Real World
Stop buying devices that require internet access, you have a supercomputer in your pocket that they can connect to. And a home network.
This may be off topic since it has nothing to do with this acquisition, but does anyone know of a equivalent or superior sleep tracker that you wear on your arm?
tldr: just say to yourself that you sleep was amazing and do not need any tracking
I have no doubt Google can tie together every aspect of my life if I let them.
That’s not all. Google also said they will not use your data to target ads. In a forward looking statement about the deal. That’s significant.
I often wonder what will happen to the few individuals who are willing to push tech/privacy issues so far that they will be okay with being left behind. In 50 years will we have communities of amish-like people who choose to continue living as if it's 2005?
Uh, nice. Oh wait. Fitbit? Wasn’t it just acquired by google? Ah I need to get off gmail too..
The watch is set up like I want it to, it can show my heartbeat during training, the steps of the day and the time. Obviously without the app and data synchronisation I will not get weekly fitness reports, but I don't really care about those.
Maybe my next watch will be a dumb one again. Didn't get that much out of a smart watch as I expected.
How did Fitbit make their money to pay for the online services? Only from selling devices? You really believe that?
