351–360 of 784 posts
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IMHO giving your health data to China is worse than giving to Google.
Why?
Currently that interest is mostly confined to China itself, but I wouldn't be surprised about that changing.
I don't know how they could use that data currently, but they are inventive and usually use everything they can get.
https://news.yahoo.com/google-acquiring-fitbit-130619853.htm... "Google has struggled to make much of a dent in the wearables category..." "Fitbit, meanwhile, has had issues maintaining growth in recent years." Failure + failure = success?
Oof. Goodbye Fitbit. Or, rather, welcome to the world where you're a pawn in internal politics. You may think you have a product but you don't. If your product survives (as in, Google didn't buy you just for the team), your product schedule will have to survive the interests of every other PA/team in Google. - You think you have software to run your products? Ha. The Android team will have a different opinion. - Even…
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80% to 90% of Google’s revenue derives from collecting your personal information, and you think that buying a wristband that tracks the biometrics of 25 million people is “just for the sake of it”?
Is it possible they see an end to this era of personal-data-valuation and are diversifying?
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Google fully deletes their user data when requested, I'm not sure why malice over data retention is being assumed here.
Do they? Or do they just anonymize it? Companies don't like to destroy assets. I don't think anybody is assuming malice, just incompetence. There are precedents after all.
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Please don't, there's a limited number of them in circulation. :) There's also zero chance it will be affected.
I'm joking, I love my pebble. Just sad to see the company who should support them begin to die.
Software is closed, no replacement parts, fewer features than marketed ("It has a microphone" -> you can never get that data, only the text from their TTS service) ...
Luckily the software part is changing with Rebble. But I don't see how anything will change for customers.
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growth != success edit: not saying it didn't used to be, up to the 20th century it certainly was.
"Growth" = ?
Just running a profitable business that's not losing market share is enough for most people's definition of success.
My friends and I have this theory that the top management at Google feels they are extremely close to general AI. With acquisitions like this we would hazard the guess that they want to see what data they are missing that could feed that borg and then buy a company that could supply the missing bits. They just have to promise that they won’t use it for ads. But if that AI gets better and better soon they have enormou…
Changes of control typically trigger a suite of investor and creditor protections. I'm beginning to favor a similar set of rights for consumers. Right to deletion would be one. Heightened portability requirements another.
An interesting idea but the reason investors + creditors can get these is because they have leverage and can negotiate for them. They are not always able to secure them. Consumers currently have no such leverage. The best avenue to this kind of leverage is probably legal?