Part of my “luddite” tendencies is an (likely overimagined) desire for personal privacy. I hope to never face athesituation where I would have to disclose such information to my insurer. Same way I will not have my car chipped to save a few dollars on car insurance.
Might be in part a generational thing, but going back a decade or more when my kids were in school (was it MySpace back then?), I didn’t understand peoples’ eagerness to share what I considered private information. Would think that concern more legitimate as bigdata is becoming bigger and bigger. My wife and I have noticed what we perceive as increased mentions of “data management” concerns not only in our local paper, but also on TV shows (Elementary and Hawaii Five-O, for example). We hoped it might suggest that younger generations might be becoming more aware of the potential negative implications of living as an open book.
I think FitBits are stupid, but people generally aren’t using them without foreknowledge of what type of data they’re collecting and what they’re doing with it. It’s like thinking that using my phone for routing/directions is creepy because it knows where I am or social media or whatever.
That said, they’re still stupid because they’re not even doing anything of value and people are making something competitive that I think actually suffers from competition rather than benefiting from it. Great, you took so many thousand steps today; you’re still not in shape. It will work fine, perhaps even better than traditional methods, for tracking running or biking or that sort of cardio, but that’s not enough. If you want to get in shape, do some research, make a workout routine, track it and stick to it. And that’s where the competitive part I see as a disadvantage, I don’t want to compete with my friends or people I work out with, we should be encouraging each other to reach our own best, not either striving to beat someone else we can’t realistically surpass in some metric, or being satisfied in being better than someone at something one should be far better at.
Channing, that’s my husband’s take on it too - he doesn’t mind everyone knowing everything about him, he just wants to get paid for it. He sees his personal data as something he should own, and they should be paying for access. It’s an interesting viewpoint; it makes a lot of sense. Never gonna happen tho.
I’m happy to see I’m not totally alone, but I am in a very small minority. Like Dinsdale, I also wonder if it’s somewhat a generational thing - I didn’t have real access to the internet until I was in college, so I missed out on a lot of the myspace and facebook start-up stuff, but did still get all the warnings about internet predators and people stealing your identity. Older people (in my experience at the library and with my family) either are super excited about family connectedness and are as integrated online as any digital native, or are unable to grasp the concept, so are either oblivious or offline, and younger people (unless they’re hipsters or otherwise being “mindful” for various reasons) seem to regard the internet and their various devices and consoles and platforms as an extension of themselves, warts and all.
For me specifically, I guess it’s a combo of being generally anxious about everything (I’m one of those “worst case scenario” worriers), and I’m not particularly social at all, let alone online.
I worry that what Stranger on a Train posted holds true - even if you did sue them and got money for the breach or release, your info is still out there and you’ll never get it back. If you don’t care, or don’t think it’s important, then that’s one thing, but if you DO think it should have been private, then all the money in the world doesn’t fix the fact that now it isn’t, and never will be.
I also wonder how long it will be before what Count Blucher and gigi talk about with insurance and health-care becomes mandatory, or at least so favorably priced that the “privacy tax” to avoid the monitoring becomes more than I can pay. I do think it’s going to happen eventually, and that’s going to be really hard for me.
One of the issues here, BTW, isn’t that a FitBit or other personal fitness tracker will give insurance companies or whomever the number of steps you walk in a day and your resting heart rate; this information is, by itself, fairly innocuous, and at most might be used to adjust your personal actuarial risk. I don’t believe there is any law regarding insurance companies or health maintenance organizations from using this information to determine a specific health risk profile and charging accordingly, and there is even an argument to be made for allowing them to do so as a means of addressing public health syndromes such as obesity and lack of fitness (although I believe participation in those programs should be strictly voluntary with a default opt out).
However, the next generation of personal fitness devices is going to do far more than just capture basic respiratory and activity data. In the next fifteen or twenty years, you can expect personal health monitoring devices to track all kind of very specific health data such as cardiac rhythm, emotional states, blood sugar and thermoregulation levels, et cetera, as well as high fidelity GIS location data. Such data could be used to reconstruct your movements to a high degree of precision, and in the aggregate, look at the detail behavior of a population and then identify activities that fall outside of that pattern; in essence, it becomes just short of a personal surveillance drone following you around 24/7 (and perhaps more effective because it will be able to report on your state anywhere). There are even some proposed functions that would record audible data, ostensibly to listen for health-related issues that cannot be determine by dermal contact sensors, but could also be used to turn a wearer into a personal surveillance system working on everyone around them, so it isn’t just an issue of your personal data. And unlike doctors, dentists, and insurance agencies, these companies have no legal obligation to protect your data beyond strict liability; it may be suppoenaed, accessed by malicious parties, or outright sold with or without personal identifying information regardless of agreements not to do so. Of the companies selling these devices and services, only Finland-based Polar Flow has a privacy policy that explicitly says it won’t sell personally identifiable data of any kind for advertising, and even that could be changed by executive fiat, albeit subject to the more stringent EU privacy laws.
Now, to put this in perspective, nearly every person in the industrial world today carries a cellular-linked computer with a vast array of recording and sensing capability plus the ability to track all communications and Internet access, so the addition of wearing a FitBit or similar device is like stepping in a puddle in the midst of a rain shower. The notion of private personal information is going to have to be seriously revised given the technology that is emerging, because short of moving into the middle of Canada and building a Faraday cage within your underground bunker constructed from insulated CONEX containers, you just cannot assure any kind of genuine privacy. And most people don’t even really want privacy; witness people posting personal and often embarrassing information on social media without a second thought as to who might see it or how it could be used. I’m not really afraid of the implications of wireless personal fitness devices or the threat they represent, but users should be aware that their personal information is only as private as the company providing the service wants it to be, regardless of their perception of who it “should” be available to.
I have one and I don’t share any info. I’m also not on Facebook or Linkedin.
I don’t wear the FitBit all the time anymore, but I did at first to get a sense of how many steps/how far I walked in what period of time. Also I wore it to bed and was astounded at how restless I was during the night. This led me to take steps (hehe) to improve my sleeping habit.
Seriously, I can’t believe the stuff that people get all worked up over.
I mean, I probably should care more about keeping my data private anyhow, but I don’t. I don’t care if companies mine the shit out of my personal info, as long as they keep offering me products better suited for my needs.
As far as Fitbits go, they don’t even register on the scale of invasive compared to cell phone companies, Google, Facebook, etc. Not to mention the freakin’ NSA.
A woman who claimed that she was raped was found to be lying because her FitBit showed she was walking around at the time that she claimed to have been being raped.
I have a Garmin version. I do upload my data, but don’t share it with anyone. Most people are giving out a lot more information with Location turned on on their phone than what this will give. It doesn’t have GPS so it can’t track where I did an activity & it’s wrist based & uses an algorithm to calculate movement to steps. However, it can be fooled both over & under. If you’re doing some activity where you don’t wear it (swimming - waterproof issues) or don’t move your arms (cycling or certain gym equipment) then it doesn’t recognize your steps / effort. One day after not getting ‘credit’ for a workout on fitness equipment, I moved my arm back & forth while driving to boost my step count, essentially catching it up to what I did in the gym.
I’m a bit :dubious: at that story, as described above, you can fake activity in them. I also know that there have been nights were I’m only x steps from my goal but looking at it after walking upstairs or to the other end of the floor & I’m still x steps from my goal sometimes a few more steps & it starts to count & sometimes it all of a sudden jumps up as if it were just slow in recording them. IOW, it has a tendency to undercount.
I doubt they are very accurate. They aren’t GPS tracking devices. They just measure motion of the device and use a lot of assumptions to calculate “steps” from that.
I also have a Garmin unit (Vivosmart HR), and this behavior is pretty normal, in my experience, but I’ve seen where others have had problems, depending on the software version.
For me, it calculates stairs after a certain elevation is ascended/descended, but not always actively, since I may not be doing the necessary flights in one attempt (I think it considers 10ft a flight?). The same is true of steps (walking), where it may not detect them immediately, but it will catch back up and add them. The intensity of activity (swimming, running, walking) all matter, but if my wrist isn’t moving, it won’t detect the activity (such as pushing a shopping cart, where you’re technically moving, but your upper body is more stationary). My wife has a Fitbit and while I think they use a different algorithm for stairs, it seems to behave similarly with other tracking.
It would almost make more sense to wear them on the ankles, lol.
Continuing on the tangent, I understand the concept of insurance – we all pay in and bear each other’s risks and conditions, genetic or self-induced. At our place, we pay in based on salary and the employer credits us as well. We have the choice of a few plans depending on the risk and out-of-pocket fees we want to take on.
Fine, we all pay in, things shake out and we all get covered for whatever happens. It was all basically anonymous and communal.
But now that people are walking by talking about registering their wellness activities, which will eventually earn them money, I start to not see the anonymity. I start to think about the individuals. The same woman who talks openly about what she puts in is the same woman who costs tens of thousands of dollars in surgery and PT for a sports injury. Fine, that’s why we have insurance. But she cost this place a lot more than I ever will (primary since I won’t ever have a sports injury ) but she didn’t pay in any more than I did, but eventually she will have lower premiums and will get incentive money because she participates in wellness points.
Maybe I can get rewarded in advance if I preemptively sign a DNR in case of a heart attack, and opt out of cancer treatments.
It does sound invasive to me. However (from the article):
And:
Which potentially sets up those policyholders for more late life chronic and catastrophic health events, costing John Hancock $$$.
Anyway, such policies will be superseded in the not-too-distant future by universal government coverage, and you can bet fitness discounts/incentives will be embedded in them too.
I find it creepy and invasive, as I do most of the new tech. I understand the biggest “privacy threat” is probably my cellphone, but I am unable to function in the modern world without it (as work is gradually pushed further and further onto these devices). Yes - I have a facebook account but there are zero posts regarding beliefs/politics and only some polite sharing of interesting trips, after the fact. I can’t believe how many fools announce to the world at large that their house will be empty for the next two weeks while they travel to… (you get the picture). I’ve always assumed the “Post if you remember what this [1960s or 70s] device is!” are attempts to gather marketing data, so I’ve never answered any of that horseshit. If you gathered all my Facebook activities in a single display, I would still be eligible for SCOTUS.
I am actively searching for and collecting older-style CPAP machines in order to avoid the new ones, which apparently are connected and want to report when and how-well I sleep to the internet at large. I find this creepy as hell also. My medical providers do not offer unconnected versions (AFAIK).
When my employer started getting invasive about my health conditions and harassing us to wear step counters (or whatever they’re called) I simply attached mine to the collar of one of my Chihuahuas when I needed to get X number of steps for some discount. I didn’t push so far as to get the “Dipshit Employee Who Walks the Very Most” award (or whatever it was called), just enough to get the discounts and keep them off my back.
I don’t have one, I don’t want one, and I don’t like the idea of someone collecting data on the minutia of my life. Yeah, I know, it still happens, but I don’t have to play all the reindeer games. I don’t have a smart phone either - not because I’m a luddite, but because I’m, um, frugal. My pay-as-you-go flip phone does what I need in a phone.
I don’t need my fridge to track my groceries, either. And I don’t want my car braking for me. Now get off my lawn!
Fitbits are nice, but their lifespans are unacceptably short.
I’m writing this post with a 62 year old mechanical watch on my wrist. It keeps time very well…at least, much better than your Fitbit will in the year 2078.
Stick with the old school, I say. We lost weight and kept it off without those devices. We can do it again today.
) but she didn’t pay in any more than I did, but eventually she will have lower premiums and will get incentive money because she participates in wellness points.