With 2026 well underway and Canada still not the United States’ 51st state, there is no better time than now to write about data privacy and wearable technology.
Wearable technology refers to technological devices which are worn such as watches, glasses, and other health monitoring devices. Many of us are now using wearable technology to track our health habits, our daily exercise goals and expenditure, our sleep quality, oxygen saturation level, blood pressure, and even our mood.
In 2022, I received a Fitbit Inspire 3 health tracker for Christmas. This gift was a game changer. Up until then, I had been relying on my iPhone 13 ProMax to track my daily steps and basic activity, but I was aware of the smartphone’s accelerometer’s lack of accuracy in terms of daily steps. Mind you, my iPhone was not intended to be a top-notch fitness tracker, but I’ll admit that it’s better than nothing. The Inspire 3, it turns out, is much more accurate than my old iPhone, but that’s because it’s equipped with sensors and accelerometers intended for this purpose.
I was delighted with my Inspire 3! It wasn’t “top-of-the-line”, but it would be a good first health device that I owned. I could spend hours setting the clock face, adding, moving, removing widgets on the app and on the web. I wanted to track my weight (to be added manually), daily step goals, but especially the tracking of my heartbeat, pulse, and irregular rhythms (fortunately, I haven’t received any.) The sleep tracker is miraculous and helped me increase from 4 to 4.5 hours of sleep every night to over 6. Game changer for me.
However, to get your health and fitness tracker to work optimally so that you may benefit from its features, you need to share some personal information. This is not just personal identifiable information (PII) as I’ve written about in a previous article, but some rather personal sensitive information. Personal sensitive information may include my weight, height, resting heart rate, pulse or heart rate in beats per minute (bpm), my birthdate, etc.
At the time, when I entered my initial weight, height, and birthdate, Fitbit hadn’t been fully acquired by Google yet, so much of this information was shared by me with my consent. Even at the time, I had figured that nobody would troll or dox me knowing only my height, weight, and birthdate, but when I began to receive email notices that my Fitbit data would now be rolled into my existing Google profile (post acquisition), I didn’t really have a choice. If I opted out from migrating my Fitbit data towards my Google profile, some of the device’s health-tracking features would go amiss.
With a sigh, I finally migrated my account from Fitbit to Google. Now Google knows more about me than I may like. Here’s what the Big G has on me: first and last name, home address, age (birthdate), credit card number, work address, car make and model and year (via Waze), every place I’ve been in the last five years (Google Maps), video viewing and browsing history (even if you think you’re browsing while in “incognito” mode), and I could go on.
I decided to dig deeper into Fitbit Inspire 3’s data collection practices. After all, sharing too much information can be a blessing if I suffer an injury on the jogging path and the emergency responders come to my rescue within minutes after I faint and bang my head on the pavement by virtue of locating me by my GPS position. According to Mozilla Foundation’s Privacy Not Included (MFPNI for short) page, people voted the Inspire 3 a “very creepy” device. Here’s the data that is collected by my FitBit Inspire 3 according to Mozilla as of November 2023:
Name, email address, or billing information, or other data that can be reasonably linked to such information by Google, such as information we associate with your Google Account; Precise geolocation data, including GPS signals, device sensors, Wi-Fi access points, and cell tower IDs If you choose: profile photo, biography, country information, and community username; Data on your activity, such as terms you search for, videos you watch, views and interactions with content and ads, voice and audio information, purchase activity, people with whom you communicate or share content, activity on third-party sites and apps that use our services, Chrome browsing history you’ve synced with your Google Account; Your address, ZIP code, and where the device is placed; Sensor data such as detected motion, ambient light measurements, temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide, and smoke levels as well as information derived from this data, such as sleep information; (If you use calls) Phone number, calling-party number, receiving-party number, forwarding numbers, sender and recipient email address, time and date of calls and messages, duration of calls, routing information, and types and volumes of calls and messages; GPS location and other sensor data from your device.
This is all good until I get to the part about my phone numbers will be used, who I called, who called me? The duration of my phone calls? What the hay? I’ can’t begin to imagine how sharing my email addresses (sent and received) will benefit my health or provide a data-point that I can act upon to improve my fitness. I must also consent to sharing my Chrome browsing history. What about the part “videos I watch?” Pretty big-brotherish, eh?
Neither am I convinced that an ambulance would be dispatched to my rescue should my Inspire 3’s accelerometer records a blunt force trauma (i.e. a fall) or if my heart goes into Atrial Fibrillation (aFib).
If you want to read the Mozilla Foundation’s Privacy Not Included research about the Fitbit Inspire 3, check it out here: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/ privacynotincluded/fitbit-inspire-3/
Considering the MFPNI’s article was las updated in November 2023, I thought I’d try to locate the latest privacy affecting Fitbit’s Inspire 3 wearable products, now superseded by Google’s. See if you can make any sense of this, but clearly, the videos you watch and the terms you search for belong to Google now.
Here are the Google Privacy Policies: https://policies.google.com/privacy.
If you think that you’re out of the woods now because you’re wearing an Apple Watch, think again. Stay tuned for an upcoming article about Apple products and their privacy bit.
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