12 ms·
Classic 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 ma
by MichaelApproved 7y ago
Classic 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 that won't stop them from writing this empty article.
- Retric 7y agoI 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. This kind of small scale boycott may actually be meaningful for those internal decisions, which IMO is interesting.
- jplayer01 7y agoI'm sure the number is fairly insignificant, especially for a company as big as Google. As for myself, I requested that all my data be deleted when I first heard rumours about the buyout, and I haven't used my Fitbit since.
- x0x0 7y agoI also deleted.
- koheripbal 7y agoWe are not representative of the general population, so our anecdotes are almost worthless.
- zeta0134 7y agoYour anecdotes may be relatively worthless to a company as large as Google, but they may yet be quite valuable to an individual reading your words. Don't be afraid to share your thoughts; sometimes these smaller, more human interactions can make all the difference.
- epistasis 7y agoRepresentative is not as important as if they influence others to act as well.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoSee also: the 90-9-1 rule, aka the 1% Rule "In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) Point is, there may be a lot of eyes that see that post and are influenced by it, but make no posts or generate no discussion of their own.
- ragequitta 7y agoI'd wager the whole 'google has all your health records' scare right now increases the number a bit right now.
- bestnameever 7y agowere you actively using it up until the announcement?
- jplayer01 7y agoI've been using it on and off since I got it a few years ago. I'll use it for a few months, then leave it for another few months. The last time I used it was from the beginning of this year 'til August. Stopped using it after that. This basically means I won't use it ever again in the future.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pmarreck 7y agoI 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 clarify for me exactly what the potential harm is here... using evidence and reason instead of conjecture and belief? Because until then, this all smells an awful lot like a conspiracy theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy-Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... Here's an example: Google has had our data for literally decades now. What is the measurable, significant harm that has resulted? And if there is nothing, what catastrophes are yet possible where a single or group of rogue bad actors profit off the suffering of many and get away with it? Please explain to me my naiveté here.
- metalchianti 7y agoJust 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.
- greggman2 7y agoThere'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"
- pmarreck 7y agoYeah, I don't understand this either. "I feel I was harmed." OK, where's your empirical reasoning to come to this conclusion?
- Angostura 7y ago
- kylebenzle 7y agoI got rid of mine too and only mentioned it to my Wife. I had no idea anyone else would have been thinking the same thing!
- cascom 7y agoI deleted my account and stopped using mine - and told no one
- JohnFen 7y ago> 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.
- blotter_paper 7y agoThe 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.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoI didn't even know there was a fitBit sdk.
- catalogia 7y agoMy mother had a fitbit and has gotten rid of it. She didn't mention it on social media because she dislikes social media companies and chooses to avoid them, which seems related to her decision to avoid Google-owned fitbit. So there is a selection bias in play. Many of the people who dislike google enough to get rid of their fitbit quite possibly also dislike social media and won't be reflected in statistics gleaned from social media.
- glial 7y agoI got rid of mine, too. Surprised to see so many others here did.
- jammygit 7y agoMy wife got rid of her spare Fitbit bands and plans to not use the Fitbit, and to replace our scale without mentioning it on social media.
- flattone 7y agoI'm getting rid of everything. I want a bumper sticker "burn fb,goo, etc to the ground"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- MichaelApproved 7y agoBumber stickers are simple to make. If you're so passionate about this, why haven't you made one yet?
- flattone 7y agoIt's just perfect that you asked. With the environment of things relating to this article but in no specific terms........ I feel uncomfortable putting these words on my car...in the US.
- MichaelApproved 7y agoSo why say that you want the bumper sticker?
- flattone 7y agoMaybe it wasn't a useful comment should I delete it?
- legoyoda 7y agoBoycott my fitbit, I will. Jog angrily outside Google HQ all day, (sans credits, or achievements,) I must.
- ne0flex 7y agoNoticed that too. Whenever there's a headline along the lines of 'People are doing x' I view that as a red flag. Similar to articles with 'experts say' in the title.
- oefrha 7y agoYou can literally write a “some users say blah blah” article with any narrative and it won’t be fake news, strictly speaking. Well, at least this article doesn’t embed a few tweets, which is an immediate sign of garbage journalism.
- ntsplnkv2 7y agoYep, immediately thought the same. Journalism is dead. It's honestly a shame.
- MichaelApproved 7y agoNo, it's not dead. There are still plenty of very good journalists and in-depth stories being published. They are just more crowded by this type of entertainment "news". If you want real news, there are plenty of places to find it.
- ntsplnkv2 7y agoAnd yet most people don't find it - why? Because it's crowded out by "articles" such as this. Most "in-depth" stories being published are just longer length narrative pushers.
- el_cujo 7y agoAnd now people who want to convince others to leave behind their fitbits need only point them to this article to lend legitimacy to the claim that "everyone is doing it!". Stuff like this is part of why people don't trust the media anymore.
- MichaelApproved 7y ago> Stuff like this is part of why people don't trust the media anymore. This kind of nonsense is nothing new. It's been going on for ages. You know those man-on-the-street news segments with people literally repeating the reporters words for a soundbite? It's the exact same thing.
- ssully 7y agoThis type of reporting is as old as the field; it's today's equivalent of "street reporting", where a reporter fields questions to people walking to work downtown their opinions on things. This isn't a scientific study, they don't have to have a complete consensus to report on what some Fitbit users are doing. Grow up.
- fractalf 7y agoI say use all the tricks in the book to get more people to stop using google. Trust in media has always been an issue. Trust a company with your data has never been worse.
- almost_usual 7y agoA better question is how many people do you think trust Google and is that number growing? Google feels like a spouse who cheated on you. You don’t trust them but you haven’t found a better option yet. I can’t imagine that helps them competitively in the long run.
- PaulHoule 7y agoI search on Bing. I still have a Google account (in fact several) but I hardly ever log in. I use it when I have to for work, but if I have any choice I use Microsoft Office instead of Google docs. Mainly I use JIRA, Slack, and tools from other vendors. I use Fastmail and EM Client for my personal mail. You get what you (do or don't) pay for. I have a Fitbit Alta HR, mainly because it is smaller than a conventional watch. I am not going to get rid of it, but I am certainly not going to replace it with a Google product. I probably won't be able to anyway since Google will probably kill it in a fit of mindlessness soon.
- jschwartzi 7y agoTake a look at Garmin watches. I replaced my fitbit with a Garmin as soon as I found out about the buyout and I couldn't be happier. It's much more capable than the Fitbit was and Garmin has an actual privacy policy instead of a ways in which we sell your data policy.
- sulam 7y agoFitbit also has a privacy policy, as does Google. It’s not actually the practice to sell your data. It’s much more valuable for them to hold onto it and sell products that use your data.
- JohnFen 7y ago> It’s much more valuable for them to hold onto it and sell products that use your data. I think that when most people say tech firms "sell your data", they include this in the definition.
- supercanuck 7y agoWhat is wrong with using Twitter as a source? This is how people communicate in 2019 What method would serve you better?
- MichaelApproved 7y agoIt's purely anecdotal. Nothing meaningful. Did these people even own Fitbits in the first place? Have they even been using them recently? How many have actually thrown them away? It's representative of nothing.
- metalchianti 7y agoMuch news relies on anecdotes. Some of which are anonymous (aka unsubstantiated) while still involving issues higher stakes. Media is about clicks and influence.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- magashna 7y agoObviously man on the street is more legitimate.
- cameronbrown 7y agoEveryone uses streets. Only a certain set of the population (usually left leaning & young) use Twitter.
- patrickk 7y agoTwitter is also overrun by propaganda bots and those peddling an agenda (e.g. Tesla perma-shorts).
- dspillett 7y agoThe issue being taken here isn't specifically twitter as a source but "a handful of tweets" as the source. Extrapolating/exaggerating from a very small sample of views into the impression of a mass movement. It is like asking a couple of random people if they know me, getting negative responses, and using them as the basis for an article about the mysterious Dave person who no one seems to know anything about.
- ekianjo 7y ago> Take a handful of tweets that share an opinion and write an article that makes it seem like there's a mass exodus. Well that's the press in 2019. Do no research at all, write clickbaity headlines, and maximize ads impressions. Content does not matter.
- onion2k 7y agoYes, some people are privacy conscious and are going to stop using Fitbit but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few? There's nothing wrong with reporting that a small number of people are publicly announcing that they're binning their Fitbit devices. They are, and they weren't before, so that's news. Are you suggesting there should be threshold an event should have to pass before it becomes newsworthy? Who would decide what that threshold is?
- thecatspaw 7y agoYes, there should be a threshold. Otherwise the newspaper is gonna be full of articles which are not interesting at all to the general population.
- onion2k 7y agoThere should be editorial judgement about whether or not something is worth publishing. That is not, and shouldn't be, a quantitative threshold.
- diffeomorphism 7y agoAn editorial judgement however absolutely should take quantities into account. What were discussing here is whether the editor's judgement was poor and not whether there is some magical, exact "this is newsworthy" criterion.
- degenerate 7y agoThat editorial judgement is exactly why most articles with no actual content are published in the first place - "We need to beef up this headline so it reaches more people" Correct headline would have been "A handful of Fitbit users are..." but it wouldn't get clicks. The editors are to blame most of the time for doing a disservice to their readers.
- iudqnolq 7y agoThat's essentially what the article title ("some fitbit users") said before OP truncated it. Credit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21573658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21573658
- outime 7y agoThe original title actually has “Some Fitbit users ...” instead of the much broader “Fitbit users ...” HN shows, which is less click-baity.
- throwaway35784 7y agoYou're turning a factual story into fake news. >but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few? No one knows except Google and fitbit. As it is, is exactly "some"and since a lot of fitbit owners don't tweet, precisely because they care about privacy, the actual number is almost definitely a multiple of the tweeters. What word other than "some" should they have used?
- magashna 7y agoI don't have a fitbit but this move and the recent nuking of accounts because of youtube have gotten me to shift all my email to another service.
- umeshunni 7y agoObligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2159/ https://xkcd.com/2159/
- mavsman 7y agoI enjoyed my time working at Amazon but this method of gathering "feedback" on a recent product launch was one of the most popular and I wasn't a huge fan. I know there was more to it than this but anytime there was a meeting where execs or product owners wanted to flex they would just grab a bunch of fanatical tweets about how great the launch/new product is, as though that proved it was a good launch.
- Bartweiss 7y agoSimilarly: 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 seems entirely possible that if there's a trend in these anecdotes it's not brand-specific. Even if Fitbit is being hit especially hard, my first guess would be that it's as much about buggy connectivity and battery issues as anything else. Even if it's not a conscious evaluation, people do sacrifice privacy based on the actual value they're getting, and Fitbit has been a bit infamous for quality issues recently. (And is that a trend or just bored writers turning an example into a narrative? No idea, but it still affects Fitbit's perception.) There are two whole schools of vacuous articles like this: either pick anecdotes and push them as a trend, or pick a broad statistical trend and narrow the focus to a group/brand which supports a narrative.
- opencl 7y agoThere's also the option of open source fitness tracker apps that don't upload your data anywhere, i.e. Gadgetbridge which I use.
- vanous 7y agoThank 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. [1] https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/ https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/
- Bartweiss 7y ago
- BurningFrog 7y agoIt's important to understand that there are so many people on Twitter, and it has such good search function, that for any clickbait "people are actually saying X about Y!!* article you can imagine, you can find 7 tweets to support it.
- ghostpepper 7y agoWhile I don't disagree with your assessment of the article's lack of sources, I do think there should be more press coverage in general of privacy issues, so I'm conflicted. If this article was written in a more "honest" way then it might just be the author's opinions on what scary things Google could someday do with massive troves of health data.
- dpeck 7y agoIn any group of meaningful size you can find most any opinion you're looking for, the majority of reporting these days seems to boil down to "Person has thoughts, some others share them. Check out the ads below, to the side, and don't forget the modal"
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoClassic example of a social media dissenting opinion. "I don't agree with TFA, so clearly they're lying. It's okay, I don't need anything more than my gut instinct to disagree."
- ninth_ant 7y agoThe person you’re responding to didn’t accuse them of lying, nor did they disagree. Selecting colourful Twitter anecdotes and meshing them into prebaked narrative with a eye catching headline makes it click bait, not journalism.
- kerng 7y agoThe article clearly states "some", I think this comment is a bit defensive in that regard.
- toraobo 7y ago> Yes, some people are privacy conscious and are going to stop using Fitbit but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few? If they were truly privacy conscious they wouldn't have a twitter anyway.
- unknown2374 7y agoThere is a big difference between the information you make public and information that you want to keep private. If you are using Twitter to express opinions publicly only, then there is little point in caring about how they deal with data you chose to make public to the entire world. Direct messaging and protected tweets are a different story though, but your statement is objectively wrong.
- toraobo 7y agoI'm pretty sure that twitter also tracks what you read even if you don't publish anything. I also remember there was no way to hide the list of people you follow? > your statement is objectively wrong. this wording may be excessively strong.
- SilkRoadie 7y agoI stopped using my Fitbit the day they were acquired. Didn't feel the need to tweet or exclaim about it. You may be surprised at the total number.
- 51Cards 7y agoWhile a lot of people here are commenting that they fall into this group I would also say that the users on this forum are in no means a representative cross-section of the general public. Everyone here is far more aware of privacy issues around Google than 99% of Fitbit users.
- scottlegrand2 7y agoGot rid of mine too after using Fitbit devices since 2011. And I'm an ex-googler and a former Amazon employee. I don't want to supply extraneous information to Amazon, Google, or Facebook. No good would come of that. And I will add that in the last year of owning a Fitbit ionic I wasn't syncing anyway because there was some sort of bug that would randomly subtract 100 or so calories every hour or so. Fitbit continued to deny the bug existed and it was never fixed.
- kseifried 7y agoI was planning to get a FitBit to replace my "veryfitpro" (it's cheap and waterproof) but cancelled that idea after Google announced the acquisition of FitBit. Now I'm seriously considering an Apple watch since they seem to be the only ones that are serious about privacy now and in the long term.
- ggggtez 7y agoYou know, back in the old days you used to make clickbait headlines using anecdata like cherry picked search terms on Google Trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=cancel%20fitbit,buy%20fitbit https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=cancel%20f... I tried a bunch of different terms, but still, I see no evidence of any exodus of any kind.
- tito 7y agoDeleted my FitBit account when I read the news.
- rubicon33 7y agoA disturbing trend of the internet age. Humans are terrible at quantifying these 'movements'. Even 50 people complaining about something can SEEM like a lot. Our brains just aren't wired to do proper statistics first analysis on incoming data. Everyone is susceptible to this default mode of thinking, including journalists. I believe it's the cause of some of the crazy, anti-science movements that we're seeing in the last 10 years.
- echelon 7y agoI 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.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoI might believe it but I never hear anyone worrying about google having their data other than my fellow computer nerds. Your average American not so much. I hear a few of them talking about not putting anything on facebook that you don't want someone to see, but other than that they don't have a clue.
- kburman 7y agoAfter reading all these comments and too got rid of my fitbitt because the concerns are very genuine. Thanks HN.