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.
"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)
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.
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.
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.
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/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.
You can do something like k-anonymizing the data and then destroying the original, personally identifiable data. But k-anonymity has its limits, too.
Every other strategy I know of assumes that it's OK to keep a private copy of the original data, which works well if we're talking about scenario such as a source that needs to keep the raw data (like a health care provider) providing the data with a semi-trustworthy external party such as a health researcher. But it doesn't address what I'm guessing is the main concern here, which is that, even if you accept for the sake of argument that Google currently has no intention to do gross things with the data, they can't make any promises that will hold indefinitely. It's a long-lived organization that whose policies might change with any change in leadership, market, or even political conditions, so any promises they might make are simply meaningless in the long run. As they would be with any organization, regardless of the presence or absence of any present-day warm fuzzy feelings.
https://www.gsa.gov/reference/gsa-privacy-program/rules-and-...
In the age of Big Data, there's only one way for data to be anonymized -- it needs to be aggregated with all the other data, and the original individual data records need to be deleted.
This, to me anyway, is lifeblood American identity stuff.
You might say "well congrats on your private liberty but youre sharing it right here for all companies to scoop up". But that's exactly that problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/fitbit-murder-arrest.h...
There is nearly zero incentive to actually your anonymize data, and anonymization doesn't make you anonymous.
This is a lesson we should have learned more than a decade ago[1], when AOL released their anonymized search data for research purposes, and thousands of people were trivially identified using it.
So, not really "nearly zero incentive" IMHO.
If companies share data between parties who want to profit from said data, nobody is going to run to their state's Attorney General over it.
How anonymised is it again?
If the people were given anonymous data that showed that 100% of the 2008 bankers were going on a cruise departing tomorrow, we could easily fix things. Well, that's what _they're_ doing to us.
https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565&
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/im-be...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tim-carney-even-law-abidi...
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-i...
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/surveillance-you-may-have-nothing...
https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-is-innately-flawed-not...
https://mashable.com/2013/06/13/julian-sanchez-nsa/
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/why-nothing-to...
Also, since you mention anonymization, many people have demonstrated how trivial it is to de-anonymize "anonymized data" particularly if you have access to multiple data sets
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak09.pdf
http://palms.princeton.edu/system/files/Quantification+of+De...
http://www.yongyeol.com/papers/nilizadeh-deanon-2014.pdf
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3dkxyw/tracking-people-on...
https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.htm...
You're arguing something different. I'm arguing that a sufficiently anonymized version of my data is not demonstrably harmful. You're arguing that privacy in general is important, which I would not dispute.
Without that part he wouldn‘t have been downvoted nearly as much.
I said that without someone explaining to me some good reason, it looked like those things. Which, you have to admit, are far and away the most common reasons people give for how they act these days. Oh sure, they insist they know The Truth, but it is often based on this or that fallacious reasoning or evidence.
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?
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.
Google is free to release positive spin articles and try to provide numbers to fit that. I don't think they will hesitate to provide more stats than we otherwise would have seen unless it is so grim that they have no way to frame it.
What were discussing here is whether the editor's judgement was poor and not whether there is some magical, exact "this is newsworthy" criterion.
Big Tech could stop that narrative by ceasing to do awful things.
This specific incident is surely rather harmless, but I wonder if the same can be said about this type of thing.
>> ...but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few? Who knows. I'm sure <X> has no clue but that won't stop them from writing <Y>.
I feel like it would be improvement if individuals and overall society (especially thoughts leaders) considered the potential importance of this general idea. I have a speculative armchair theory that the incredible changes in the amount and style of information (news, memes, forum discussions) people consume due to the introduction of the internet and 24 hour cable news is doing something to humans on a deep psychological basis, that it may be significantly altering our heuristics in a historically abnormal way, resulting in a large amount of incorrect perceptions and negative behaviors.
Is this really happening, might there be some truth to this, could some people be truly affected by this? A lot? A few? Who knows. But if it is happening, to a degree that is non-negligible, and nobody notices, how damaging might the effects be? Could this, say, affect how people treat others on a daily basis? Might it play a role in how they vote in elections, or make personal decisions on various public policy matters? To me, these seem like questions worth considering.
0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
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.
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.
This is a great analogy! It's crazy how much my opinion of Google has changed in the past decade or so. Judging by comments on HackerNews and elsewhere, many others feel the same.
I also feel similarly about Amazon. I enjoy using it less and less, but it's been hard to completely drop.
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.
(To add to the pile of anecdotes, I haven't yet stopped using my Fitbit because of the modern American dystopian need to appease the "Wellness company" that influences my Health Insurance pool and costs. But it's been heavily on my mind since the Google purchase and I will probably switch to something else whenever I free up enough gadget budget.)
I think that when most people say tech firms "sell your data", they include this in the definition.
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.
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.
[x] Check :)
Gadgetbridge intentionally does not have network permissions. There is a manual and periodical data export allowing you to push your data for further storage, processing, visualizing etc.
Looks interesting, hadn't come across it before.
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.
Well that's the press in 2019. Do no research at all, write clickbaity headlines, and maximize ads impressions. Content does not matter.
Well, at least this article doesn’t embed a few tweets, which is an immediate sign of garbage journalism.
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.
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.
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.
I want a bumper sticker "burn fb,goo, etc to the ground"
I'm also replacing my Nest with an Ecobee soon now that they're forcing Google account migrations on everyone.
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.
If they were truly privacy conscious they wouldn't have a twitter anyway.
Direct messaging and protected tweets are a different story though, but your statement is objectively wrong.
> your statement is objectively wrong.
this wording may be excessively strong.
What method would serve you better?
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.
Should People be concerned about their privacy?
Or should we not consider that thought until we collect a representative sample size?
This is how a certain demographic communicates in 2019. Twitter does not represent society as a whole.
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.
Thanks HN.
Selecting colourful Twitter anecdotes and meshing them into prebaked narrative with a eye catching headline makes it click bait, not journalism.
>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?
Journalism is dead. It's honestly a shame.
If you want real news, there are plenty of places to find it.
Because it's crowded out by "articles" such as this.
Most "in-depth" stories being published are just longer length narrative pushers.
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.