News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Fitbit is now officially part of Google by sulam on Thursday January 14, 2021 @11:37PM (#25787066)
Reading, and I guess I'll take the time to explain why it works this way. Unfortunately I have to keep it at fairly high level. Long story short, we don't trust the transport mechanisms by which our customer's data gets from their wrist to our backend. As such, we securely encrypt it on the device and that encrypted payload can only be decrypted once it's on our servers. At that point it becomes available to be fetched over secure APIs.

We've considered other ways of doing this that will preserve our requirements to keep customer data private and unable to be tampered with. We will likely make it more flexible in the future, but this is the scheme that has worked since the company was founded, almost 14 years ago.

Re:Fitbit is now officially part of Google by 6sup6 on Friday January 15, 2021 @12:49AM (#25787465)
What about...just providing a desktop app to receive all the data and do all the computation needed? Or the same thing in your phone. What are the exact dangers of these two approaches? And dangers to whom?
Re:Fitbit is now officially part of Google by sulam on Friday January 15, 2021 @08:45AM (#25790857)
Then they would have those keys. Phone security has gotten a lot better in 14 years, but it hasn’t always been great, and desktop security is still not so awesome.
Re:Fitbit is now officially part of Google by csours on Thursday January 14, 2021 @11:48PM (#25787124)
Thanks for the explanation! Key escrow is hard, eh?