[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.