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I would not advise to use or buy pebble if you're concerned about privacy. As a company, they don't seem to be particularly interested in it. For example: I wa

I would not advise to use or buy pebble if you're concerned about privacy. As a company, they don't seem to be particularly interested in it. For example: I was investigating some time ago (might have been updated) how to register a new pin in the timeline from the phone and apparently the way to do it was to send the contents of it to Pebble servers. Assuming their app uses the same API, it means every single calendar item you see in your timeline is actually sent (and possibly logged) in their servers. I raised this point to their support and in pebble forums and got no answer.

xyzzy_plugh 10y ago
I assume this is because there may not be sufficient storage on the watch itself, nor the phone, and you don't want to drop potentially important data! My understanding is that all the data (apps, notifications, etc.) on the watch effectively sits in a cache, which pulls from the phone which is just a secondary cache of all your stuff in their cloud. This removes storage as a limitation. Then it just becomes a matter of ensuring your most pertinent data is in the right caches. I agree however that it would be nice for Pebble to explain how they protect your personal data in their cloud. Hopefully they don't mine/sell it.
- roblabla 10y ago
  Sure, but it should be possible to only keep the data on your phone, and not let it leak all the way to the pebble cloud. It's a bit of a strange decision to force people to use their cloud :|.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Yeah. Personally I don't care that much about what they're doing with the data on their cloud, but it seems weird that my watchapp (or a companion app) needs to talk to the Internet at large to push pins onto the watch timeline. Doubly weird because I hoped to use it for pushing data generated by my phone, and there's no reason this shouldn't work completely off-line.
unwiredben 10y ago
On their pebbledev Slack, some of the engineers talked about how the timeline system works a while back. While end-user apps go through Pebble's servers for timeline posts, the local Pebble app on the phone can also add timeline entries; your calendar data stays on the phone and the feed to the watch is a merge of the feed from Pebble's cloud and the local data.
fra 10y ago
You're right, the public timeline API does require hitting our servers. However, the calendar pins we push from our mobile apps do not use that public API and thus do not - as far as I know - hit the cloud.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Any plans on changing that? I mean, there doesn't seem to be anything in Timeline that inherently requires routing stuff through your server. That's the one thing that always perplexed me - you could do almost anything to Pebble without touching the outside world, and here there's that one thing that suddenly requires the cloud. If I may ask, what is the reason you built it this way?
  - IanCal 10y ago
    You can put things in the timeline from an external place, so I can push something to many timelines (e.g. sports scores) using pebbles API. That definitely requires going through pebbles servers.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Makes sense, but it still shouldn't preclude my companion app from pushing pins to my watch's timeline completely off-line. The sane model seems to be a timeline stored locally on your Pebble app that can be synced to the Pebble cloud. What I understand from the current model is that Pebble app is just a dumb cache.

xyzzy_plugh 10y ago

I assume this is because there may not be sufficient storage on the watch itself, nor the phone, and you don't want to drop potentially important data! My understanding is that all the data (apps, notifications, etc.) on the watch effectively sits in a cache, which pulls from the phone which is just a secondary cache of all your stuff in their cloud. This removes storage as a limitation. Then it just becomes a matter of ensuring your most pertinent data is in the right caches. I agree however that it would be nice for Pebble to explain how they protect your personal data in their cloud. Hopefully they don't mine/sell it.

roblabla 10y ago
Sure, but it should be possible to only keep the data on your phone, and not let it leak all the way to the pebble cloud. It's a bit of a strange decision to force people to use their cloud :|.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Yeah. Personally I don't care that much about what they're doing with the data on their cloud, but it seems weird that my watchapp (or a companion app) needs to talk to the Internet at large to push pins onto the watch timeline. Doubly weird because I hoped to use it for pushing data generated by my phone, and there's no reason this shouldn't work completely off-line.

unwiredben 10y ago

On their pebbledev Slack, some of the engineers talked about how the timeline system works a while back. While end-user apps go through Pebble's servers for timeline posts, the local Pebble app on the phone can also add timeline entries; your calendar data stays on the phone and the feed to the watch is a merge of the feed from Pebble's cloud and the local data.

fra 10y ago

You're right, the public timeline API does require hitting our servers. However, the calendar pins we push from our mobile apps do not use that public API and thus do not - as far as I know - hit the cloud.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Any plans on changing that? I mean, there doesn't seem to be anything in Timeline that inherently requires routing stuff through your server. That's the one thing that always perplexed me - you could do almost anything to Pebble without touching the outside world, and here there's that one thing that suddenly requires the cloud. If I may ask, what is the reason you built it this way?
- IanCal 10y ago
  You can put things in the timeline from an external place, so I can push something to many timelines (e.g. sports scores) using pebbles API. That definitely requires going through pebbles servers.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Makes sense, but it still shouldn't preclude my companion app from pushing pins to my watch's timeline completely off-line. The sane model seems to be a timeline stored locally on your Pebble app that can be synced to the Pebble cloud. What I understand from the current model is that Pebble app is just a dumb cache.