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Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

finance.yahoo.com

71–80 of 137 posts

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#71

> modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people! Please no. Surely nobody thought collecting health data from all their users was a good idea, right? > That’s exactly what Fitbit (FIT) has done. It has now logged 150 billion hours’ worth of heart-rate data. From tens of mil…

Heaven forbid a foreign company knew about my heart rate and age.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#72
post #36

While I am a privacy advocate in most aspects, I fail to see how my basic health data like HR, weight etc is going to be used against me except for bad marketing practices. If I talk ill about some political ideologies and that gets stored until some evil dictator gets in power, that I can get. But who is going to put me in prison for having a high heart rate? The benefits in the other hand is great. I get to see and…

> and they can use my data along with many others to get patterns and help improve the health of everyone. Are they actually doing it? How? I'm a big fan of Datensparsamkeit[0]. Either they actually use this data to further medical research (which is something that would be marketed loudly), or there is no basis to assume they maybe, at some point, could - possibly - do it. Beyond that, I see no valid reason why this…

Either they actually use this data to further medical research (which is something that would be marketed loudly)

https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press-relea...

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#73

> modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people! Please no. Surely nobody thought collecting health data from all their users was a good idea, right? > That’s exactly what Fitbit (FIT) has done. It has now logged 150 billion hours’ worth of heart-rate data. From tens of mil…

Why do you care so much? No one is forcing people to use FitBit. If you don’t agree with their practices or data collection then don’t use their products.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#74

Are there any relatively dumb trackers that can log only locally or to Apple Health without aggregating my data or storing in the cloud? I’d like to replace a Charge HR and have some activity tracking and real time heart rate.

Amazfit Bip. Does pretty much everything an Apple Watch does for a fourth of the price.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#75
post #2

A low (R)HR isn't always indicative of good health. High blood pressure can cause your HR to drop, for instance. I hope they're actively researching their data set, I suspect we can learn a lot from it. They might even be able to detect certain arrhythmias, though that can't be easy with just an optical sensor which only reads HR. With a user base this large, I'm sure people have died while wearing their fitbit. Mayb…

I'd love to see more information about blood rheology and actual flow versus extremas of pressure waves.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> health data like HR, weight etc is going to be used against me except for bad marketing practices You could pay more for health and life insurance.

One problem facing insurance companies is the asymmetric information between buyer and seller. Should we be able to keep our age secret when buying life insurance? How about sex or weight? My teenage son is in all likelihood a less safe driver than the average teenage woman, should a woman pay the same for her insurance as the generally more reckless man? With regard to our health information, should we be keeping in…

Seems to me like one should pay more for risky things one can control (still smoking, excessive drinking, eating poorly if you can afford to eat well, etc.) but not for things one cannot control (genetics, sex -- insert typical list of protected classes here). And that is super complicated.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#77

> modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people! Please no. Surely nobody thought collecting health data from all their users was a good idea, right? > That’s exactly what Fitbit (FIT) has done. It has now logged 150 billion hours’ worth of heart-rate data. From tens of mil…

Heaven forbid a foreign company knew about my heart rate and age.

And then determined that you actually are 80% more likely to have early stage heart disease based on a big data analysis tool, and then sold that information to an insurance company, which correlated it with other data they have (like strava's activity times) to uniquely identify you, and now wants to raise your premiums by 400% because you have a "increased likelihood of a pre-existing condition".

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#78
post #73

> modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people! Please no. Surely nobody thought collecting health data from all their users was a good idea, right? > That’s exactly what Fitbit (FIT) has done. It has now logged 150 billion hours’ worth of heart-rate data. From tens of mil…

Why do you care so much? No one is forcing people to use FitBit. If you don’t agree with their practices or data collection then don’t use their products.

Was FitBit upfront about this when they sold their products though? I don't actually know the answer and I think that's a critical piece of information.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think than having less data about human health is better ... because ... privacy? That goes against any progress that was ever achieved in medicine. Or do you have some way of reconciling that man sticking a finger up another man's rectum is good and private but keeping records of something like a heartrate throughout the day is ... im-private? ... and bad?

Fitbit is not a medical R&D company. It's a fitness gadget vendor. Is all this data used for furthering medical research? If so, by whom? If not, why does Fitbit need it, and what does it do with it?

There is no medical R&D comapny that could run a test that fitbit runs as a sideshow to their business.

So either fitbit gathers this data or noone does. What will it do with the data? I hope it will anonimise it reasonably and puts it up on the internet for free but that's a bit unrealistic. I think it will pass the data to researchers, similar way other companies did in the past. That's beneficial in my book and I much prefer that scenario to the scenario where they just discard the data.

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