[Riseed]

>> Garmin is the only one I actually trust currently, as they've shown 0 willingness to monetize your health information.

> What about the concern that the company is bought out in the future? Or that it may be sharing data already, with government agencies, etc? Or companies that it works with? > It boggles my mind, that people ... come to the judgement that its ok for corporations to have this personal data!

I'm not OP. I chose Garmin precisely because I don't think it's ok for corporations to have this personal data.

I chose Garmin because I can use it without needing to share any* of my data with a third party, including Garmin itself. I save the workout files to my computer via the same USB cable I use to charge the watch. There are various non-cloud apps I can use to view and analyze these workouts, if I actually cared to do so beyond the "fastest 5k" etc that the watch tracks automatically.

For this, it does not matter to me whether Garmin is bought out in the future because my watch works just fine as-is, and cannot update its OS without my explicit permission. I'm unsure what data Garmin would be capable of sharing because I have given it none.

* of course, speed/time/location data is obtained by pinging GPS/GLONASS satellites, but the watch can and does record my workouts quite accurately in non-GPS pedometer mode.

[exabrial]

Garmin was designed to work off grid and not need the internet lifeline to San Francisco or us-east. Can't say that about any of their competition.

[NoboruWataya]

And yet when they got hit by ransomware a while back their mobile and web apps were rendered useless. You could neither add new activities, nor view old activities, nor sync with other apps.

You could of course access the .FIT files directly on your device via USB, so maybe that's what you meant. Their hardware is pretty good for working off grid but you need other software to do anything with the data it creates unless you're connected to their servers.

[Riseed]

> And yet when they got hit by ransomware a while back their mobile and web apps were rendered useless. You could neither add new activities, nor view old activities, nor sync with other apps.

Isn't that to be expected, if you're using their cloud services? The point is that Garmin is (or was, I've had my watch for a few years) designed in such a way that the cloud services are not a requirement for full use of the device.

Yes, you can access the .FIT files directly via USB and then sync with other apps, such as TurtleSport, GPXsee, etc.

[NoboruWataya]

> Isn't that to be expected, if you're using their cloud services?

For the most part, yes, though I don't think it is particularly unreasonable to expect that you could view some of your recent activities in the app without having to phone home, given how small the .FIT files tend to be.

Syncing with other apps is also something I would expect could be done without phoning home, assuming the other app is capable of parsing your .FIT file directly (which Strava is). In that case all the app needs to do is fetch the .FIT over Bluetooth and pass to the third party app using whatever phone API.