[MichaelApproved]

Classic example of an article in search of a movement.

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.

[Retric]

I don’t know about anyone else, but I just got rid of my Fitbit and never spoke of it on social media. My guess is it’s limited a few thousand to low tens of thousands of people which is not economically meaningful on it’s own. But, it does show another side of the privacy debate.

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.

[jplayer01]

I'm sure the number is fairly insignificant, especially for a company as big as Google. As for myself, I requested that all my data be deleted when I first heard rumours about the buyout, and I haven't used my Fitbit since.

[bestnameever]

were you actively using it up until the announcement?

[jplayer01]

I've been using it on and off since I got it a few years ago. I'll use it for a few months, then leave it for another few months. The last time I used it was from the beginning of this year 'til August. Stopped using it after that. This basically means I won't use it ever again in the future.

[x0x0]

I also deleted.

[koheripbal]

We are not representative of the general population, so our anecdotes are almost worthless.

[zeta0134]

Your anecdotes may be relatively worthless to a company as large as Google, but they may yet be quite valuable to an individual reading your words. Don't be afraid to share your thoughts; sometimes these smaller, more human interactions can make all the difference.

[epistasis]

Representative is not as important as if they influence others to act as well.

[blaser-waffle]

See also: the 90-9-1 rule, aka the 1% Rule

"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.

[ragequitta]

I'd wager the whole 'google has all your health records' scare right now increases the number a bit right now.

[JohnFen]

> I don’t know about anyone else, but I just got rid of my Fitbit and never spoke of it on social media.

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.

[blotter_paper]

The population who ditches them might also be skewed towards developers, which might mean that less people are hacking on the Fitbit SDK which could hurt their ecosystem. Apple has tried to court developers for this reason. Losing a piece of that market might be more hurtful to a company than losing a similar absolute number of the general population.

[lazyasciiart]

I didn't even know there was a fitBit sdk.

[catalogia]

My mother had a fitbit and has gotten rid of it. She didn't mention it on social media because she dislikes social media companies and chooses to avoid them, which seems related to her decision to avoid Google-owned fitbit.

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.

[kylebenzle]

I got rid of mine too and only mentioned it to my Wife. I had no idea anyone else would have been thinking the same thing!

[cascom]

I deleted my account and stopped using mine - and told no one

[jammygit]

My wife got rid of her spare Fitbit bands and plans to not use the Fitbit, and to replace our scale without mentioning it on social media.

[glial]

I got rid of mine, too. Surprised to see so many others here did.

[pmarreck]

I have never felt harmed or threatened by the idea that my anonymized data (health or otherwise) is being used by large organizations... assuming it is anonymized.

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.

[Erlich_Bachman]

Because it is -never - going to be anonymized. They are going to call it anonymized, and then publicly apologize for it not being so a couple of times, while keeping business as usual. There is just no incentive for them to anonymize it.

[mumblemumble]

More to the point, I'm not even sure that, in principle, it is possible to truly anonymize this data without spoiling the data science easter egg hunt. And the easter egg hunt is arguably the entire point of this kind of data collection.

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.

[kazinator]

Basically the data, to be useful, has to be capable of uncovering correlations with all sorts of demographics. Those clues can de-anonymize it. If we take your name out of a data frame (so that we can call it "anonymous") but leave all sorts of other properties (those being the payload useful to data science), you may be nevertheless identifiable from that combination of properties, together with other info known about you from other tracking sources.

[stjohnswarts]

Yeah, I totally believe it can be anonymized, but when they attach geo data, age data, etc you can be picked out of the crowd with just a bit of analysis. Plus I don't think most of them actually anonymize it. They just say they do. There's no one auditing them until a court order happens.

[pmarreck]

Every organization and project I've worked for, for companies much smaller than Google, has done its best to comply with eliminating PII.

https://www.gsa.gov/reference/gsa-privacy-program/rules-and-...

[metalchianti]

Just because YOU haven't felt harmed or threatened doesn't mean that others feel that way. I generally agree with you but with some caveats. For example, users should have the ability to opt-in/out of data collection. Additionally there are some actors I would choose NOT to share this data with. Google is one of them.

[greggman2]

There's a difference between actually harm and perceived harm. Lots of people feel harmed and threatened by vaccines. I'm not saying you shouldn't have privacy but I claiming you "feel harmed and threatened" isn't really an answer to "what's the harm"

[pmarreck]

Yeah, I don't understand this either. "I feel I was harmed." OK, where's your empirical reasoning to come to this conclusion?

[JohnFen]

> assuming it is anonymized.

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.

[munk-a]

And sadly that's never going to happen because those individual data records are valuable.

[flattone]

If you research this via sprinkling of curiosity allocated time over the course of a year..you will not care. Because it isn't about what has already gone wrong. It isn't even about harm or risk. In the outside its about this information is me. It is mine. It is easy to disregard my dignity) autonomy/my precious private personal traits, preferences etc.

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.

[close04]

But look at how Google approaches this topic (were you even aware they had this data?) compared to Apple who advertises very clearly that they will use it in studies, etc. It's not only what you do but how you do it also. Transparency can go a long way.

[lazyasciiart]

Because this data exists, people will rely on it being accurate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/fitbit-murder-arrest.h...

[heavyset_go]

> Please explain to me my naiveté here.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

[Angostura]

> I have never felt harmed or threatened by the idea that my anonymized data (health or otherwise) is being used

How anonymised is it again?

[whycombinater]

Because anonymous percentages can be interpreted as the likelihood that you yourself are those things, like a sort of quantum mechanical cat paradox. I believe it's also how our "collective consciousness" and language kind of works (you're outputting what you hope they'll be inputting based on what people typically will input). Basically, if anonymous stats show 99.9999% of people watch child porn, I can now accuse you beyond a reasonable doubt (roughly) of watching child porn. Or like if it become known that 80% of people were trans, I might stop going on Tinder. While I don't know _you_, given a bunch of data, I know "people like you", "your people", or whatever other phrase that half of people find offensive and the other half find accurate. Black people be black, almost by definition. Jews are Jews. I'm now seen as a racist white male KKK incel Trump supporting basement dwelling... Wait, we're getting off topic. The point is, society retardation aside, data will only ever be used to judge you to the best of its ability, and rarely in a way that will let you bang more hot women, but more frequently in a way that raises the prices of what you want or need or places you in jail. Cops will park where people "tend" to speed. They didn't know _you_ would be speeding, but ... they did. You are betrayed by your peers to evil forces.

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.

[authoritarian]

This sounds a lot like the the "I have nothing to hide so it doesn't matter who has my data argument," in which case here are a number of resources discussing why privacy matters and why you should care even if you have 'nothing to hide':

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.astonzhang.com/papers/social_deanony.pdf

[pmarreck]

You actually forgot my favorite one on this topic:

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.

[onion2k]

Yes, some people are privacy conscious and are going to stop using Fitbit but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few?

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?

[thecatspaw]

Yes, there should be a threshold. Otherwise the newspaper is gonna be full of articles which are not interesting at all to the general population.

[onion2k]

There should be editorial judgement about whether or not something is worth publishing. That is not, and shouldn't be, a quantitative threshold.

[degenerate]

That editorial judgement is exactly why most articles with no actual content are published in the first place - "We need to beef up this headline so it reaches more people"

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.

[iudqnolq]

That's essentially what the article title ("some fitbit users") said before OP truncated it.

Credit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21573658

[yabadabadoes]

So given that in most cases only the company has access to numbers and any multi-product company can choose not to reveal break down statistics.. I guess it's only positive pieces from now on?

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.

[diffeomorphism]

An editorial judgement however absolutely should take quantities into account.

What were discussing here is whether the editor's judgement was poor and not whether there is some magical, exact "this is newsworthy" criterion.

[knzhou]

There already is. In tech reporting, the criterion whether it can be fit into the pre-existing narrative of Big Tech being evil. There are similar numbers of people thanking Google for new features every day, but you won't hear about that.

[JohnFen]

> narrative of Big Tech being evil.

Big Tech could stop that narrative by ceasing to do awful things.

[mistermann]

> There's nothing wrong with reporting that a small number of people are publicly announcing that they're binning their Fitbit devices.

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.

[knzhou]

A threshold is a good thing, because if you can be entirely selective in your reporting, then you can convince people of any narrative you want. This is the Chinese robber fallacy [0].

0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...

[scottlegrand2]

Got rid of mine too after using Fitbit devices since 2011. And I'm an ex-googler and a former Amazon employee. I don't want to supply extraneous information to Amazon, Google, or Facebook. No good would come of that.

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.

[almost_usual]

A better question is how many people do you think trust Google and is that number growing?

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.

[rurp]

> Google feels like a spouse who cheated on you. You don’t trust them but you haven’t found a better option yet.

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.

[tekknik]

Why do you feel similarly about Amazon?

[PaulHoule]

I search on Bing.

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.

[jschwartzi]

Take a look at Garmin watches. I replaced my fitbit with a Garmin as soon as I found out about the buyout and I couldn't be happier. It's much more capable than the Fitbit was and Garmin has an actual privacy policy instead of a ways in which we sell your data policy.

[sulam]

Fitbit also has a privacy policy, as does Google. It’s not actually the practice to sell your data. It’s much more valuable for them to hold onto it and sell products that use your data.

[WorldMaker]

The concern is that Fitbit was a product company. (Garmin is a product company. Apple is a product company. Etc.) Google has never seen themselves as a product company. They make a few products, certainly, but they're an ad company first and foremost to their shareholders, and a service company if anything else past that. Products are very low on the Google totem pole in terms of revenue or more critically ideals in how the company sees itself, and sells itself to its own investors.

(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.)

[JohnFen]

> It’s much more valuable for them to hold onto it and sell products that use your data.

I think that when most people say tech firms "sell your data", they include this in the definition.

[Bartweiss]

Similarly: even if a nontrivial number of people are dumping wearable trackers, is there evidence that it's disproportionately happening now or to Fitbit because of Google?

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.

[opencl]

There's also the option of open source fitness tracker apps that don't upload your data anywhere, i.e. Gadgetbridge which I use.

[vanous]

Thank you for mentioning Gadgetbridge [1]! Interestingly enough, i find people mentioning Gadgetbridge under very many recent smart band/watch/gadget related articles here on NH.

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.

[1] https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/

[Bartweiss]

I'd never heard of Gadgetbridge, but "local storage" would certainly be my requirement. It's the same issue as smart-home devices (without voice control): from a user viewpoint there's absolutely no benefit to having them phone home.

[vanous]

>but "local storage" would certainly be my requirement.

[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.

[justinclift]

GadgetBridge main website:

https://gadgetbridge.org

Looks interesting, hadn't come across it before.

[outime]

The original title actually has “Some Fitbit users ...” instead of the much broader “Fitbit users ...” HN shows, which is less click-baity.

[SilkRoadie]

I stopped using my Fitbit the day they were acquired. Didn't feel the need to tweet or exclaim about it. You may be surprised at the total number.

[pnw_hazor]

I did the same for my Nest cams -- don't have a twitter account so maybe I don't count?

[tripzilch]

Like YouTube tells you when you accidentally hit the like-button: "Sign in to make your opinion count."

[mavsman]

I enjoyed my time working at Amazon but this method of gathering "feedback" on a recent product launch was one of the most popular and I wasn't a huge fan.

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.

[ekianjo]

> Take a handful of tweets that share an opinion and write an article that makes it seem like there's a mass exodus.

Well that's the press in 2019. Do no research at all, write clickbaity headlines, and maximize ads impressions. Content does not matter.

[oefrha]

You can literally write a “some users say blah blah” article with any narrative and it won’t be fake news, strictly speaking.

Well, at least this article doesn’t embed a few tweets, which is an immediate sign of garbage journalism.

[dpeck]

In any group of meaningful size you can find most any opinion you're looking for, the majority of reporting these days seems to boil down to "Person has thoughts, some others share them. Check out the ads below, to the side, and don't forget the modal"

[ne0flex]

Noticed that too. Whenever there's a headline along the lines of 'People are doing x' I view that as a red flag. Similar to articles with 'experts say' in the title.

[rubicon33]

A disturbing trend of the internet age.

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.

[ghostpepper]

While I don't disagree with your assessment of the article's lack of sources, I do think there should be more press coverage in general of privacy issues, so I'm conflicted.

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.

[51Cards]

While a lot of people here are commenting that they fall into this group I would also say that the users on this forum are in no means a representative cross-section of the general public. Everyone here is far more aware of privacy issues around Google than 99% of Fitbit users.

[el_cujo]

And now people who want to convince others to leave behind their fitbits need only point them to this article to lend legitimacy to the claim that "everyone is doing it!". Stuff like this is part of why people don't trust the media anymore.

[MichaelApproved]

> Stuff like this is part of why people don't trust the media anymore.

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.

[ssully]

This type of reporting is as old as the field; it's today's equivalent of "street reporting", where a reporter fields questions to people walking to work downtown their opinions on things. This isn't a scientific study, they don't have to have a complete consensus to report on what some Fitbit users are doing. Grow up.

[fractalf]

I say use all the tricks in the book to get more people to stop using google. Trust in media has always been an issue. Trust a company with your data has never been worse.

[flattone]

I'm getting rid of everything.

I want a bumper sticker "burn fb,goo, etc to the ground"

[legoyoda]

Boycott my fitbit, I will. Jog angrily outside Google HQ all day, (sans credits, or achievements,) I must.

[MichaelApproved]

Bumber stickers are simple to make. If you're so passionate about this, why haven't you made one yet?

[flattone]

It's just perfect that you asked. With the environment of things relating to this article but in no specific terms........ I feel uncomfortable putting these words on my car...in the US.

[MichaelApproved]

So why say that you want the bumper sticker?

[flattone]

Maybe it wasn't a useful comment should I delete it?

[echelon]

I got rid of mine. I know that's just anecdotal.

I'm also replacing my Nest with an Ecobee soon now that they're forcing Google account migrations on everyone.

[ggggtez]

You know, back in the old days you used to make clickbait headlines using anecdata like cherry picked search terms on Google Trends.

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.

[magashna]

I don't have a fitbit but this move and the recent nuking of accounts because of youtube have gotten me to shift all my email to another service.

[kseifried]

I was planning to get a FitBit to replace my "veryfitpro" (it's cheap and waterproof) but cancelled that idea after Google announced the acquisition of FitBit. Now I'm seriously considering an Apple watch since they seem to be the only ones that are serious about privacy now and in the long term.

[stjohnswarts]

I might believe it but I never hear anyone worrying about google having their data other than my fellow computer nerds. Your average American not so much. I hear a few of them talking about not putting anything on facebook that you don't want someone to see, but other than that they don't have a clue.

[kerng]

The article clearly states "some", I think this comment is a bit defensive in that regard.

[BurningFrog]

It's important to understand that there are so many people on Twitter, and it has such good search function, that for any clickbait "people are actually saying X about Y!!* article you can imagine, you can find 7 tweets to support it.

[toraobo]

> Yes, some people are privacy conscious and are going to stop using Fitbit but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few?

If they were truly privacy conscious they wouldn't have a twitter anyway.

[unknown2374]

There is a big difference between the information you make public and information that you want to keep private. If you are using Twitter to express opinions publicly only, then there is little point in caring about how they deal with data you chose to make public to the entire world.

Direct messaging and protected tweets are a different story though, but your statement is objectively wrong.

[toraobo]

I'm pretty sure that twitter also tracks what you read even if you don't publish anything. I also remember there was no way to hide the list of people you follow?

> your statement is objectively wrong.

this wording may be excessively strong.

[tito]

Deleted my FitBit account when I read the news.

[supercanuck]

What is wrong with using Twitter as a source? This is how people communicate in 2019

What method would serve you better?

[dspillett]

The issue being taken here isn't specifically twitter as a source but "a handful of tweets" as the source. Extrapolating/exaggerating from a very small sample of views into the impression of a mass movement.

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.

[supercanuck]

Is the point of the article valid?

Should People be concerned about their privacy?

Or should we not consider that thought until we collect a representative sample size?

[JohnFen]

> This is how people communicate in 2019

This is how a certain demographic communicates in 2019. Twitter does not represent society as a whole.

[MichaelApproved]

It's purely anecdotal. Nothing meaningful.

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.

[metalchianti]

Much news relies on anecdotes. Some of which are anonymous (aka unsubstantiated) while still involving issues higher stakes. Media is about clicks and influence.

[magashna]

Obviously man on the street is more legitimate.

[cameronbrown]

Everyone uses streets. Only a certain set of the population (usually left leaning & young) use Twitter.

[patrickk]

Twitter is also overrun by propaganda bots and those peddling an agenda (e.g. Tesla perma-shorts).

[kburman]

After reading all these comments and too got rid of my fitbitt because the concerns are very genuine.

Thanks HN.

[umeshunni]

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2159/

[phjesusthatguy3]

Classic example of a social media dissenting opinion. "I don't agree with TFA, so clearly they're lying. It's okay, I don't need anything more than my gut instinct to disagree."

[ninth_ant]

The person you’re responding to didn’t accuse them of lying, nor did they disagree.

Selecting colourful Twitter anecdotes and meshing them into prebaked narrative with a eye catching headline makes it click bait, not journalism.

[throwaway35784]

You're turning a factual story into fake news.

>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?

[ntsplnkv2]

Yep, immediately thought the same.

Journalism is dead. It's honestly a shame.

[MichaelApproved]

No, it's not dead. There are still plenty of very good journalists and in-depth stories being published. They are just more crowded by this type of entertainment "news".

If you want real news, there are plenty of places to find it.

[ntsplnkv2]

And yet most people don't find it - why?

Because it's crowded out by "articles" such as this.

Most "in-depth" stories being published are just longer length narrative pushers.