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They spent so much time worried about fashion that it would have been nice if they'd spent even a tiny amount of time thinking about respecting user's privacy o
by autoexec 2y ago
They spent so much time worried about fashion that it would have been nice if they'd spent even a tiny amount of time thinking about respecting user's privacy or their own morals. They refused, as a design decision, to allow users to download their data to their PC instead of having it uploaded to FitBit's servers because they wanted to collect that data and use it for their own purposes.
Protecting their user's privacy was such an afterthought that their website in 2008 didn't even have a privacy policy which violated the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003. When they finally did add one it said that they sold your data to third parties for marketing/consumer research and used it to push ads at you for "health clubs, weight loss programs and sports and fitness equipment"
Ultimately what they built was just one more shitty ad platform that exploited people's personal data for the benefit of several third parties at the expense of their users. It's no wonder that they got bought by Google, the ultimate ad platform that exploits people's personal data.
It's such a shame, because they had an opportunity to create something useful that worked for the people who paid for the product instead of turning those paying customers into another product to sell. The fact that they were exploiting people's health data just made it even worse.
I've never owned a FitBit and have often warned others to avoid them. Initially, I'd recommended pedometers that worked just as well (if not better) without the spying and ads, but these days wearable devices are capable of doing a whole lot more and it's still hard to find ones that respect their customers enough to let them control their own data and prevent it from being sold to data brokers, governments, and ad companies.
I'm sure the FitBit will always be viewed as a great success story, but all I see is a tragedy and a lack of ethics.
- dxbydt 2y ago> refused to allow users to download their data > instead of having it uploaded to FitBit's servers I download my monthly data from the fitbit server into LibreOffice. I have about 2 million steps on my fitbit. I have csv files going back to 2019 ever since I purchased the fitbit. They've made a nice dashboard, with some badges. I share the dashboard with friends, bit of a social competitive streak. If I were to directly download the data from the fitbit to my ubuntu desktop, I would have to write a fileparser & then make a dashboard & all that...not interested. I want to walk, not do software in my offtime.
- autoexec 2y agoThey could just as easily given people the option to not use their website while still letting those who wanted to use it. Whatever google does now though is a different story entirely. My personal preference back in 2008 would have been the ability to pull raw data off the device, but also for it to include an accompanying CD with some basic software to generate pretty graphs or whatever locally. It'd be easy enough to text/page/email a friend with the number of steps I logged for the previous day, or even write up something that would let us share/graph our results together. Admittedly, I actually do enjoy writing software in my offtime though. I'd like to think that if if things had been different there'd have been several open source options for visualizing, tracking, and sharing FitBit data for those who couldn't or didn't feel like writing their own.
- fbthrowaway12 2y agoFitbit didn't sell ads or user data. We were entirely reliant on revenue from device hardware sales, which is why you saw the attempts to pivot into subscription revenue in the later years. Data export could have been more accessible, but it was available via the website and web APIs. Fitbits grew to be much more than a basic pedometer, and many features needed post-processing on the backend servers.