I have a Fitbit. Actually, I had a Fitbit. I lost my Fitbit a week ago. I don’t know how I lost it…one minute I was wearing it, and the next I wasn’t. But the timing was good because it meant Janet was able to give me a new Fitbit for Christmas. I loved the gift. Until I didn’t.
I stopped loving the gift when I tried to set up my new Fitbit. Let me just say it was an education in big data mining. It turns out that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, bought Fitbit back in 2021. And in order to set up my new Fitbit Charge 6, Alphabet required that I migrate my Fitbit account to Google. That may not seem like a big deal except for the fact that I hate Google. Mostly. I do like their Flights app, but as a search engine, Google sucks. When I ask Google a question, all I get are sponsored web sites that pay to show up at the top of the list of search results. That’s why I switched to AI-driven Perplexity for my searches. When I ask Perplexity a question I get answers, not ads. I also get a list of the sources it uses to give me the answers, so I can engage my critical thinking skills to evaluate the answers.
I’ve had a Fitbit account since 2012, when Janet and I bought our first Bluetooth enabled scale. And when I created my account in 2012, I entered weight and health data from as far back as 2010. In order to activate my new Fitbit Charge 6, I was forced to send Alphabet my health information and trends from the past 14 years. I have a problem with that, but I did it anyway. Shame on me.
I know Alphabet will do several things with the data I was forced to send them, just to be able to use a step tracker. The first thing they’ll do is monetize it. I’ll start getting ads for Noom and Ozempic, because in spite of my bariatric surgery and the resulting 120-pound weight loss, I am still technically overweight. Mainly because BMI is used as the gold standard for such things. I am of Celtic origins, which means I am stout by nature and my BMI is never going to be what the charts consider “healthy.”
The other thing that will happen is it will impact my health insurance. Why? Because they have 14 years’ worth of data on me…my weight, my relatively sedentary lifestyle (based on my daily step count), my heart rate, and my sleep patterns. Fortunately, I become Medicare eligible in 11 months, so it won’t matter so much.
There is a reason companies like Alphabet purchase companies like Fitbit. It gets them access to some of the most personal information…your health and activity levels. Which they want so they can monetize it. I deleted my Facebook account recently because I was tired of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta monetizing my posts. I signed up originally to see posts from my kids with pictures of my grandkids. I deleted my Facebook account because I was getting 30 unsolicited posts, reels, and suggested “friends” for every post I actually cared about. Most were innocuous, but some were borderline pornographic, outright racist, and homophobic. Sorry Mark (Zuckerberg)…you failed.
I don’t need the crap that Facebook was pushing to me in my life, and I certainly didn’t ask for it. I get tons of spam e-mail from politicians I don’t agree with or care for, just because Zuckerberg sells Facebook personas and profiles to anyone willing to pay him for them. Sure, I can hit the “spam” button, or unsubscribe to the mailing lists Facebook sold me out to, but why should I have to? I didn’t ask for that stuff.
I will keep my Fitbit, and I will use the app because I find value in the data it provides me. And it is way less expensive than an Apple Watch. That’s my choice. But all the rest is Alphabet and Meta’s choice, and I shouldn’t be forced to tolerate it for the convenience of tracking my steps, heart rate, and sleep patterns.
And that's all I have to say about that.
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