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Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#41

Post by specialist »

kendallpark wrote: post #24
saagarjha wrote: post #4

> 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…

> "Anonymized". Just with the data posted above, it seems like it'd be pretty easy to correlate the data to a person. And auto-enrolling everyone who buys a health product is not an excuse to mine all their data. Hospitals are allowed to anonymize protected health information in their medical records to mine the data (they can distribute it too) without the patient's consent. PHI is way more protected than consumer h…

File under believe but cannot prove:

In the privacy arm's race, deanonymization will always win in the long run.

The best we can do is temporary privacy.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#42

Post by specialist »

mscasts wrote: 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…

If my health data is so valuable, then I should get paid for it.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#43

Post by mscasts »

specialist wrote: post #42
mscasts wrote: 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…

If my health data is so valuable, then I should get paid for it.

Well, you kind of are but not in terms of money but rather with increased knowledge of patterns which should be avoided. They can tell you how to get healthier, identify the optimal sleep and exercise patterns, identify if certain places causes people to be more healthy/unhealthy etc.

Companies will most likely use this information as selling points for their devices / apps. I value this information much higher than a small amount of money.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#44

Post by Engineering-MD »

mscasts wrote: 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…

> fail to see how my basic health data like HR, weight etc is going to be used against me except for bad marketing practices.

I actually looked into this in some (limited) detail, although for a slightly expanded definition of all data a Fitbit (and the near future similar devices) could collect.

Heart rate data has been used in legal cases in the past. In an insurance fraud case, heart rate data from a pacemaker was used to provide evidence the events could not have occurred as described [1]. Similarly activity data has been used to defend against a false rape claim [2]. There is no reason such data could not be used in any other legal case.

The data collected by such devices can also reveal much more information about yourself than most think. By watching hand movements via accelerometer, smokers can be identified with 95% accuracy [3]. Users can be tracked via Bluetooth identifiers, or via the unique walking pattern of each individual [4]. Even when encrypted, users can be identified by the frequency of communication to the smartphone. Furthermore, pins can be identified by monitoring users hand motion via accelerometer [5]. For more advanced next generation fitness trackers tracking your ECG, this has been shown to be as unique as a fingerprint, allowing individuals to be uniquely identified across devices [6].

There is no reason that this data could not be used against you via insurance companies to change insurance costs (smoker, type of transport, heart health, activity) or even force you to wear one much like some car insurance requires black box monitoring. You could be taken in for insurance fraud by saying you are not a smoker, or it could potentially be used against you in court. This data can also be falsified, meaning fake data could potentially be used against you.

In summary, there are many other privacy problems with fitness trackers.

[1] https://apnews.com/c55eac83846f42e19fb924e57917001b

[2] https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2015/07/can-your-fitbit-da... be-used-against-you-in-court.html

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilaria_Torre/publicatio...

[4] https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/fitness-trackers-open-effect...

[5] https://www.stevens.edu/sites/stevens_edu/files/ChenWearable...

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003132030...

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#45

Post by Engineering-MD »

Tharkun wrote: 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…

While you are correct, it’s not normally seen as an indicator of high blood pressure. The larger concern would be an arrhythmia or a form of heart block. These are definitely dangerous, but usually concern is only raised if symptomatic or the heart rate is below 50. Even in this case, a heart rate below 50 can be normal in very athletic people.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#46

Post by ivelkov »

kendallpark wrote: post #28
stef25 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old are you? How many work outs or what frequency thereof does it take to notice lowering of your RHR ?

Young adult. It takes about 1-2 weeks to notice a trend. I'm just looking over my summer RHR data and it pretty much matches my activity level. Steady decline in May and June when I was working out consistently. Steady climb after I injured my knee and had to lay off a bit. Decline when I got back on the exercise horse. Incline towards the end of the summer when workouts became rare due to wrapping up projects and tr…

Here are my RHR stats and Total Distance stats from the last 12 months:

- RHR - https://ibb.co/gbbV2z

- Distance - https://ibb.co/gGtk2z

I do mostly running with some very infrequent gym and ski. There's definitely a correlation between activity level and RHR.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#47

Post by mscasts »

Engineering-MD wrote: post #44
mscasts wrote: 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…

> fail to see how my basic health data like HR, weight etc is going to be used against me except for bad marketing practices. I actually looked into this in some (limited) detail, although for a slightly expanded definition of all data a Fitbit (and the near future similar devices) could collect. Heart rate data has been used in legal cases in the past. In an insurance fraud case, heart rate data from a pacemaker was…

First of all, thanks for the thorough post!

[1] and [2] sounds kind of positive rather than negative though.

Maybe smokers ought to pay more for their insurance? I'm not saying it's great that they can track people who smoke but the data could as well be used to strengthen your case, isn't that right?

I get it if you are an US-citizen and don't want to use fitness tracker that sends data to their servers but I am a Swedish citizen. I don't have a health insurance so I don't have to worry about any insurance company finding out anything about my health.

Maybe there are privacy concerns and maybe they should be addressed, but there is also most likely a lot of benefit to be gained from these systems. Just because the US has a crappy health system that exploits tech like health trackers doesn't mean that the health tracker stuff is inherently bad. Since I live in EU, I can also require them to delete the data thanks to GDPR.

TL;DR: I get the worry you may have as an US citizen, but basically none of these concerns seem to apply to a EU citizen that have universal health care.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#48

Post by wmblaettler »

I have to wonder about the "findings" regarding sleep of 7 hours being a causation for a lower RHR. Could it be that the cohort of those who are getting up early to exercise regularly are trading an hour of sleep in order to do so? To assume that "too much sleep is bad for you" seems incorrect given just the aggregate of all data with so many other variables.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#49

Post by brlewis »

tartrate wrote: post #7
saagarjha wrote: post #4

> 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…

I wonder to which extent tracking data is really anonymized since users can still request to delete it, as described in the privacy policy [1]. > If you choose to delete your account, please note that while most of your information will be deleted within 30 days, it may take up to 90 days to delete all of your information, like the data recorded by your Fitbit device and other data stored in our backup systems. This…

I work for Fitbit. I don't speak for Fitbit, but the web page you cited does.

I don't see any claims to anonymize unshared data. I just see "We may share non-personal information that is aggregated or de-identified so that it cannot reasonably be used to identify an individual."

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#50

Post by brlewis »

solveit wrote: post #13
saagarjha wrote: post #4

> 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…

>"Anonymized". Just with the data posted above, it seems like it'd be pretty easy to correlate the data to a person. Yep. Location at 3am tells you where they live, and you're basically done already.

That is a correct logical conclusion if you start with the assumption that the data shared with David Pogue included all the data Fitbit has. But maybe you shouldn't start with that assumption.

Disclaimer: I work for Fitbit, but don't speak for Fitbit.

EDIT: Actually there's an additional assumption here, one which I also make, that any app with location permissions has all my GPS location data. But that assumption may be false here. It sounds like where I'm sleeping at 3am isn't recorded according to https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/2134

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