Your Fitbit is useless – unless you consent to unlawful data sharing
Your Fitbit is useless – unless you consent to unlawful data sharing
noyb filed three complaints against Fitbit. The health and fitness company forces new app users to consent to data transfers
The whole landscape of health trackers is depressing. I bought a fitbit last year as I could expend it at work, and I ended up leaving it in a drawer exactly for the uneasy feeling of sharing very sensitive data. Health data is probably the most impactful on personal lives (insurances, banks, etc.), and it's astonishing to me how it's too much to ask to a company that makes watches to have watches as their mine business model.
I understand sharing data for further analysis etc., but I should be able to use my health tracker locally, only talking to my phone app and nothing else, similar to how gadgetbridge works. I was eyeing banglejs specifically to be able to do this, even though it's not really a health tracker.
Gadgetbridge ftw
🤣🤣
Hardly surprising since they were acquired by Google.
If a given form of data sharing is illegal, then you shouldn't be able to consent to it, especially now that we have awareness of dark patterns used to pressure people to consent to surrender their rights away.
The same reason a click-wrap TOS cannot be binding (as of 2020, I think) because it's too easy to run a contract by customer the length of Richard III and the end user give up and click without reading (or comprehending).
And this is why I refuse to buy devices that depend on "the cloud" to essentially work at all. Getting harder though...
I know this might be a far shot, but does anyone have any recommendations for a privacy respecting smart watch?
Pinetime isn't the most robust of smartwatches, but I would say it fits the bill.
I have one. It does the bare minimum (show time, count steps, show notifications), everything else doesn't work very well, including the heart monitor. But the battery lasts for almost a month. And it's completely offline, no cloud services. I would still recommend it.
I'll check it out! Thank you for the recommendation 🙂
Apple is generally really good with privacy stuff. The health data stays on device unless you enable iCloud backup/sync. You can choose what app (if any) you’d like to share which part of your health data with (at which point you’re beholden by those app’s workflows and privacy policies). You can read directly from Apple here.
But the limiting factor is that you’d need to buy in to the rest of the ecosystem… or at least an iPhone. Not an issue for me, but YMMV depending on personal preferences.
I appreciate that! Yeah, firmly in the android camp with GrapheneOS as my custom ROM 😅 Otherwise it would be an excellent fit based on your rec!
Also consider looking into Gadgetbridge and the list of devices it supports!
Garmin or Casio ones, since they are not a phonemaker and strictly do watches, and have a name behind them.
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