Re:Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data
by wlesieutre on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @10:18AM
(#17918168)
Personally I trust the recently completed[1] Apple/Stanford heart study with my health data a lot more. It's a company with a record of protecting personal data, and on the Stanford side was presumably approved by an IRB before they collected a single piece of data.
Granted it's not the same dataset as you'd get from a "Collect everything and figure out what to do with it later" approach, but I think it strikes a better balance.
For all we know, Fitbit's eventual plan is to sell their heart data to your insurance company so they can say "It looks like you have a higher than average resting heart rate and don't exercise much, we're going to double your premiums." Heck, maybe Fitbit isn't planning that, but they'll go out of business in 20 years and auction your heartrate history to someone else who does that. We have no idea.
Granted it's not the same dataset as you'd get from a "Collect everything and figure out what to do with it later" approach, but I think it strikes a better balance.
For all we know, Fitbit's eventual plan is to sell their heart data to your insurance company so they can say "It looks like you have a higher than average resting heart rate and don't exercise much, we're going to double your premiums." Heck, maybe Fitbit isn't planning that, but they'll go out of business in 20 years and auction your heartrate history to someone else who does that. We have no idea.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/01/apple-heart-study-survey/