Info 202 Fall 2011

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/07/05/fitbit-moves-quickly-after-users-sex-stats-exposed/

This article is about how Fitbit, a high-tech accelerometer
you wear which tracks your movement and downloads/tracks that data on their
website, was allowing users' sexual activity data to be searched on google.
This story broke about the same time I got a Fitbit, so I found it particularly
interesting and have a bit of additional insight beyond what was mentioned in
the article. For starters, the actual data Fitbit collects is only part of
their service; their website offers the ability to add information about many
things related to overall health: fitness, sleep (they provide a wrist band so
you can wear it while sleeping), food intake (which it then converts to calorie intake), what your mood is and what kind of
exercise you've gotten which may not be accurately tracked by the device
itself. They have calorie expenditures programmed for hundreds of activities,
including coal mining and aishinaabe jingle dancing (which in case you didn't
know is a Native American dance); it was in this context that sexual activity
was an option.

 The real issue was that the default option for how this
information is shared was 
"anyone", and it's my guess that most people didn't even
notice it, much less change it. They asserted this was to encourage social engagement with other
users and a friendly sense of competition, however I suspect the marketing
department would have encouraged anything that would get their product to show
up in search results. Along these same lines are Facebook's complex and
convoluted privacy policies which they've gotten lots of bad press for.

My opinion is that the issue of what companies do with the
personal data we entrust to them is an evolving narrative, and there will be a
constant push and pull between our expectations and demands versus what benefits
the companies for some time. Social norms of what kind of privacy expectations we have
are changing as we find benefits from sharing information we might have
previously not, and companies are learning that having users' trust is much
more valuable than their name showing up in search results more often. However
I was disappointed in Fitbit when I discovered (as research for this blog
entry) that tracking sexual activity is no longer one of their pre-programmed
activity options. Not because it's something that I would ever want to track
personally, but because it implies they learned the wrong lesson; the problem
wasn't offering the ability to track sexual activity, it was about defaulting
to share private information. 

A POST SCRIPT ABOUT THE FITBIT: Although I was dubious when I first got my Fitbit that I
would get much benefit from having my activity and sleep tracked, I was
surprised how fun it was to see those numbers and the new perspective it gave
me on my activity level. I've attached a screenshot of the "dashboard" of my account so if you're curious, you can see the way the data is presented. I'm usually wearing it, so if you want to check it out, just ask next time you see me!