[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.