Late last year, Google announced its intention to purchase Fitbit for a whopping $2.1 billion. A pretty hefty price tag for a personal fitness tracking company that currently garners less than 5% market share.
What gives? Does Google have a vested interest in creating a new revenue stream via a wristwatch that lets Betty in Boise know whether she’s nailing her 10,000 steps a day? Is the smartwatch market so alluring that one of the largest companies in the history of the world just has to grab its piece of the pie? Or is the massive acquisition about something else entirely?
Well, yeah.
Anyone who has had the bone-chilling privilege of watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix (which, by the way, I highly recommend) knows that just about everything big tech does boils down to one ultimate goal, which is to amass more data from you, your kids, their teachers, the mailman... and Betty.
Tech companies have created ways to monetize nearly every literal and figurative step you take that can be electronically tracked. They already know what videos you watch, which online stores you frequent, which photographs you like (or love!) on social media and which political ads attract you (or make you irate). Essentially, they know what triggers you to act, then they leverage this data to create algorithms that both predict your actions and enhance your opportunities for engagement with advertisers. Which of course is a nice way of saying that they are manipulating you into buying stuff so they can increase their advertising revenue.
It might not seem like that big of a deal, after all, we have become wise consumers and are use to salesmen constantly pitching their wares. If you can look past the manipulation by big data (Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, to name a few) and just don’t really care about your personal preferences being exploited, you might just take it more personally when it starts to profoundly affect your health, your life and your wallet.
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Back to the Fitbit Thing
Fitbit, like other smartwatches, currently has the ability to track metrics like steps taken, miles run and hours biked. All pretty useful measures for people working on tracking and improving their health. The gizmo and its app also monitor things like resting heart rate, optimum heart rate and sleep duration. Again, pretty cool and useful. So, what is the concern?
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