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Avast Blog_Tips & Advices: Here's what your Fitbit knows about you
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Ensure that you're comfortable with the exchange of data for Fitbit's service

I think about my body a lot. I think about how it feels; how to make it feel better; what parts hurt; what I’m putting into it; how it’s sleeping; how much it weighs; how tall it is; whether or not it’s going to get Covid-19; how to treat it better… You get the idea.

And as someone who thinks about their body a lot, I’ve chosen to use a Fitbit — specifically a Fitbit Inspire HR — to help me understand it. But it wasn’t until I started this What Does the Internet Know About Me? series that I realized that while the Fitbit gives me a lot of information about myself, I don’t actually know what it knows about me.

What Fitbit tracks

Let’s start with the obvious: The purpose of a Fitbit is to help you track your health, in various ways. Users can customize what they want to track. I’m tracking:
  • Sleep: When and how much
  • Heart rate: Resting; 24/7 tracking
  • Steps: Per day and per hour
  • Weight: Including weight change
  • Food: Calories in; food eaten
  • Exercise: What I do; when I do it; how much I do it; what I do the most
  • Friends: I’m only connected to my older brother (who always beats me in step count) but users can connect their contacts, Facebook, email, or search by username
  • Device: Which one I have; which hand I wear it on
On the less obvious side of things, the Fitbit also knows:
  • When I wake up and go to bed: Through silent alarms and sleep tracking
  • Profile information: Birthday; sex; height; weight; location (if you share — I don’t)
  • Timezone: I didn’t share my location, but it knows my time zone is Pacific
  • IP address: If you visit the Fitbit website
What Fitbit could potentially figure out

And then there are the even less obvious things that Fitbit could know about you, if they really wanted to. The following is all conjecture — there’s no evidence that Fitbit has an interest in figuring this stuff out about users. But I wanted to highlight how this data can be used in ways we all, as users, might not think about. 

I decided to focus on whether or not Fitbit can tell when a user ingests different types of intoxicating substances. For example, a few months ago I had a boozy, full afternoon brunch with friends. Altogether, it was a very unhealthy day.

But when I got home, I noticed I’d burned over 3,000 calories that day, despite sitting on my butt and not getting even close to my 10,000 step goal. What was that about? 

So I did some research. According to threads on the Fitbit Community site, it’s common for resting heart rate to go up a few beats both while drinking and for a couple of days after. This can “confuse” your Fitbit, because a higher heart rate should mean more physical activity — but in this case just means you’re boozing.

I was surprised by some of the other edge ways that people are using Fitbit. According to articles from 2018, at least one person was using their Fitbit to monitor how harder drugs were affecting them. There were also stories about using the Fitbit to keep a handle on drug use at Burning Man, the yearly music and art festival.

It might seem farfetched, but it’s theoretically possible that Fitbit — or someone with their hands on a user’s Fitbit data — could use a combination of location data (are they at a bar? At a festival like Burning Man?), time of day, and heart rate to determine if someone was ingesting a substance. For this to work, aggregate data would need to be studied to identify the markers of one activity (such as using an illicit substance) from other activities. This might be far unlikely, but even a simple peak at someone's data would allow you to draw broad conclusions about their health.

Potential insurance tie-ins

A perhaps more common theoretical situation is what could happen if the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is eliminated, allowing insurance companies to deny coverage if someone has a pre-existing condition. In that case, Fitbit data could be used to determine if someone has a heart condition, is overweight or obese, or even if they have issues with fertility.

Has this been done so far? Not to our knowledge. But we do know that Fitbit has programs that work with both insurance companies and employers. We also know that they share data with law enforcement if they’re legally required to. It’s impossible to know all of the edge cases of how this data could theoretically be used, but it’s important for us as users to understand the fact that there are edge cases — and that data this personal might reveal things about us that we’d prefer not to be revealed.

Lastly, I was curious about whether or not Fitbit knows my social media handles. In my profile, I checked out “Third Party Apps,” which showed that the only one I’d connected was MyFitnessPal. However, if you use the Facebook or Google sign-in option for Fitbit, it will have that information. 
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