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Fitbit is now officially part of Google

blog.fitbit.com

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Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#331

Post by omosubi »

IgorPartola wrote: post #254
reportingsjr wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an entire hardware division that regularly churns out quite high quality consumer hardware: nest. They also have a pretty big hardware group that makes high performance servers and specialty hardware (TPU servers among other things). They have a few other hardware divisions as well. Google would have absolutely no issue creating quality fitbit devices. Whether or not the market would be there for them to st…

Nest was acquired and was already a mature and popular product. They by no means built it from scratch. And enterprise server products are probably outside the scope of what we are talking about, which is consumer electronics. I can build you a pretty decent server pretty quickly. I wouldn't know where to start to create a smart watch that had good battery life, great screen, great app ecosystem, great sensors, and d…

Google's pixel phones were initially pretty well received, especially the camera

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#332

Post by sakopov »

It's incredibly scary to see how many people on HN are content with giant corps becoming even bigger. I would much rather see Fitbit naturally fail and go bankrupt than become part of Google. We need regulations and we need them yesterday. This cannot go on the way it has.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#333

Post by sulam »

csours wrote: post #251

If someone from Fitbit is reading this: It is asinine that the data from my wearable has to go to my phone, up to the cloud, and back down to my phone for display.

Reading, and I guess I'll take the time to explain why it works this way. Unfortunately I have to keep it at fairly high level. Long story short, we don't trust the transport mechanisms by which our customer's data gets from their wrist to our backend. As such, we securely encrypt it on the device and that encrypted payload can only be decrypted once it's on our servers. At that point it becomes available to be fetched over secure APIs.

We've considered other ways of doing this that will preserve our requirements to keep customer data private and unable to be tampered with. We will likely make it more flexible in the future, but this is the scheme that has worked since the company was founded, almost 14 years ago.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#334

Post by csours »

KMag wrote: post #297
chaostheory wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not 'asinine' if you're worried about cost, size, and weight. An all in one device is going to be larger, heavier, and cost more than device that relies on a smart phone.

The GP is complaining about the phone -> server -> phone data path of the wearable -> phone -> server -> phone workflow for generating a nice graph. Presumably they think uploading the data to the server should be optional for backup/social purposes and not a part of just viewing the collected data.

Exactly. And even if it does eventually get uploaded, I might be using my devices not in a data connected area. It's just a lazy architecture.

Edit, may not be entirely laziness: see this response to my question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787066

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#335

Post by na85 »

aboringusername wrote: post #42

One thing that confuses me is why this data needs to be stored within the internet at all. Why can't I have an entirely offline driven system? Data stays local, no ability to upload it online at all, and all processing is done without ever needing the internet. That's a key criteria if I ever was thinking of getting a smart wearable, I'm not going to generate even more data that can be profited from and potentially u…

>Why can't I have an entirely offline driven system?

Because that's less profitable for the corporate data barons.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#336

Post by csours »

chaostheory wrote: post #281
csours wrote: post #251

If someone from Fitbit is reading this: It is asinine that the data from my wearable has to go to my phone, up to the cloud, and back down to my phone for display.

It is not 'asinine' if you're worried about cost, size, and weight. An all in one device is going to be larger, heavier, and cost more than device that relies on a smart phone.

Each device should be as capable as possible. There are features not implemented on the wearable, and there are features not implemented on the phone, as someone else pointed out, they could not change a basic setting from the phone or the wearable.

I understand there's a feature set trade off, I don't necessarily want a wearable that connects to the internet itself.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#337

Post by csours »

sulam wrote: post #333
csours wrote: post #251

If someone from Fitbit is reading this: It is asinine that the data from my wearable has to go to my phone, up to the cloud, and back down to my phone for display.

Reading, and I guess I'll take the time to explain why it works this way. Unfortunately I have to keep it at fairly high level. Long story short, we don't trust the transport mechanisms by which our customer's data gets from their wrist to our backend. As such, we securely encrypt it on the device and that encrypted payload can only be decrypted once it's on our servers. At that point it becomes available to be fetch…

Thanks for the explanation! Key escrow is hard, eh?

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#338

Post by beachy »

leokennis wrote: post #156
yomly wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reads like sarcasm but it's more a sign that our views do not leak out of our echo chamber. I have a friend who works for the government and laments at how much red tape there is to acquire or link any dataset and wishes for more data acquisition. To be fair, her use cases were sincerely benign - being able to target people who qualify for more welfare/govt assistance, and being able to make the govt website more…

But that’s the thing. I work for a bank. If I had unlimited access to all transaction data without needing to request elevated access and jumping some more hoops, it would greatly speed up my daily work. But...it would also greatly increase the damage any hacker could do. Same applies to Google. It’s super convenient to have everything “on Google”. Until the day Google is exposed/hacked/turns evil. Then it’s a disast…

> Hoping the above won’t happen is not a strategy but a gamble.

Life's a gamble. Crossing the road on your way to work is gamble. Heck it's a gamble that you won't be taken out in the next 12 months by an insidious disease.

The bet I have placed personally is that Google is better at looking after my personal data that I am - so for example I use gmail instead of my own email server.

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#339

Post by harry8 »

Good jumping off point to ask: What can we use to get our fitness data from our smart watches and keep the data private to ourselves?

I have gadgetbridge with a Lenovo WatchX. Cheap, cheerful, works ok without competing with apple watch for quality. Great battery life.

https://gadgetbridge.org/

What else is there?

Re: Fitbit is now officially part of Google

#340

Post by KMag »

csours wrote: post #334
KMag wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP is complaining about the phone -> server -> phone data path of the wearable -> phone -> server -> phone workflow for generating a nice graph. Presumably they think uploading the data to the server should be optional for backup/social purposes and not a part of just viewing the collected data.

Exactly. And even if it does eventually get uploaded, I might be using my devices not in a data connected area. It's just a lazy architecture. Edit, may not be entirely laziness: see this response to my question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787066

As I remember, my FitBit HR holds less than 10 days' worth of heartbeat data, and can't be uploaded to the phone without the phone having connectivity to FitBit's servers. Also, extracting large amounts of data from the FitBit tends to time out and require a full retry. On more than one occasion, I was on vacation with my wife in a foreign country and only got a local SIM card for her. This resulted in me turning off automatic sync (to avoid battery drain from all the failed attempts). This resulted in me relying on manually sync'ing my FitBit data when I had WiFi, which resulted in my forgetting. This resulted in data loss.

Also, I seem to remember long syncs timing out so many times in a row that I just had to factor-reset my FitBit HR to clear its data buffer. This happened more than once. It really needs an incremental sync.

When I got my FitBit HR, my wife was interested in using my original FitBit. I proceeded to update its firmware right before I gave it to her, but the firmware update seems to have timed out and broken the FitBit. I recovered once with a factory reset, but a second firmware update attempt bricked it.

Honestly, IoT devices need minimal firmware in non-brickable ROM that checksum the firmware in flash before jumping to the firmware in flash. If the checksum fails, then make a light blink and go into a recovery mode that implements a minimal Bluetooth or HTTP firmware update, preferably incremental, requiring minimal state, and recoverable/restartable if that minimal state gets corrupted. Back in the day, I bricked a WRT54G router by using Firefox to upload the firmware instead of Safari or I.E. (It was a known non-deterministic issue, apparently. I'm guessing a corner-case in the router's handling of chunked HTTP encoding.) Not even the trick of shorting two adjacent pins using an x-acto knife could get the recovery TFTP server to come up.

Also, during the first year warranty period, my FitBit HR died twice, presumably due to being splashed so much with salt water during dragon boat race practice. I know it says not to go swimming with it, but you should really avoid excessively splashing it with seawater. When my FitBit HR died a third time shortly after the warranty period, I gave up on FitBit for a while.

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