They should probably send a GDPA request to delete all their data as well.
Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
191–200 of 241 posts
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#192Classic example of an article in search of a movement. 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…
I got rid of mine. I know that's just anecdotal.
I'm also replacing my Nest with an Ecobee soon now that they're forcing Google account migrations on everyone.
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly: even if a nontrivial number of people are dumping wearable trackers, is there evidence that it's disproportionately happening now or to Fitbit because of Google ? 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…
There's also the option of open source fitness tracker apps that don't upload your data anywhere, i.e. Gadgetbridge which I use.
Thank you for mentioning Gadgetbridge [1]! Interestingly enough, i find people mentioning Gadgetbridge under very many recent smart band/watch/gadget related articles here on NH.
Gb is under constant development - improvements and new devices are being added all the time, thanks to the main developer who is really good with the deep BLE stuff. The app provides a great value in notifications (and their filters), steps/sleep/activity collecting and visualizing, button actions and more. We are looking for help, however, with some of the obvious things like nicer activities listing, simpler imports of data exported from other services etc, so feel free to stop by the Matrix chat or on Codeberg/Github.
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t know about anyone else, but I just got rid of my Fitbit and never spoke of it on social media. 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.
The population who ditches them might also be skewed towards developers, which might mean that less people are hacking on the Fitbit SDK which could hurt their ecosystem. Apple has tried to court developers for this reason. Losing a piece of that market might be more hurtful to a company than losing a similar absolute number of the general population.
I didn't even know there was a fitBit sdk.
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I just got rid of my Fitbit and never spoke of it on social media. My guess is it’s limited a few thousand to low tens of thousands of people which is not economically meaningful on it’s own. But, it does show another side of the privacy debate. Many companies are selling data not because it’s significant revenue, but rather because they have no reason to leave money on the table.…
I have never felt harmed or threatened by the idea that my anonymized data (health or otherwise) is being used by large organizations... assuming it is anonymized. 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 clarif…
Because this data exists, people will rely on it being accurate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/fitbit-murder-arrest.h...
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly: even if a nontrivial number of people are dumping wearable trackers, is there evidence that it's disproportionately happening now or to Fitbit because of Google ? 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…
There's also the option of open source fitness tracker apps that don't upload your data anywhere, i.e. Gadgetbridge which I use.
I'd never heard of Gadgetbridge, but "local storage" would certainly be my requirement. It's the same issue as smart-home devices (without voice control): from a user viewpoint there's absolutely no benefit to having them phone home.
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never felt harmed or threatened by the idea that my anonymized data (health or otherwise) is being used by large organizations... assuming it is anonymized. 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 clarif…
Just because YOU haven't felt harmed or threatened doesn't mean that others feel that way. I generally agree with you but with some caveats. For example, users should have the ability to opt-in/out of data collection. Additionally there are some actors I would choose NOT to share this data with. Google is one of them.
There's a difference between actually harm and perceived harm. Lots of people feel harmed and threatened by vaccines. I'm not saying you shouldn't have privacy but I claiming you "feel harmed and threatened" isn't really an answer to "what's the harm"
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it is -never - going to be anonymized. They are going to call it anonymized, and then publicly apologize for it not being so a couple of times, while keeping business as usual. There is just no incentive for them to anonymize it.
More to the point, I'm not even sure that, in principle, it is possible to truly anonymize this data without spoiling the data science easter egg hunt. And the easter egg hunt is arguably the entire point of this kind of data collection. You can do something like k-anonymizing the data and then destroying the original, personally identifiable data. But k-anonymity has its limits, too. Every other strategy I know of a…
Basically the data, to be useful, has to be capable of uncovering correlations with all sorts of demographics. Those clues can de-anonymize it. If we take your name out of a data frame (so that we can call it "anonymous") but leave all sorts of other properties (those being the payload useful to data science), you may be nevertheless identifiable from that combination of properties, together with other info known about you from other tracking sources.
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#199After having worked at Google, it is the only company I actually do trust with my data. (But I am also ok with them using it to customize my experience, and even target ads) 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.
I'm an Xoogler who worked on the privacy team a few years ago. All of this is true, and at the time I worked there, I made the conscious, considered decision to buy in to the Google data collection ecosystem because I trusted the people I worked with to protect my data. Several years out, I no longer trust Google - not because I trust my former (immediate) coworkers less, but because the direction the entire advertis…
Thanks for sharing.
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.
Re: Some users say they're getting rid of Fitbit because they don't trust Google
#200"Google could know which medications I take, and what any medical diagnosis's I have," Carpenter said. "It makes me feel sick to my stomach." 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?
They are not doing this anymore [0] and I assume there is a reason for that. 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/a…
> missing at the peak of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent.
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?