Engineering the First Fitbit: The Inside Story | Hacker News Reader

Engineering the First Fitbit: The Inside Story

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58 pointsBrajeshwar14 comments

They spent so much time worried about fashion that it would have been nice if they'd spent even a tiny amount of time thinking about respecting user's privacy or their own morals. They refused, as a design decision, to allow users to download their data to their PC instead of having it uploaded to FitBit's servers because they wanted to collect that data and use it for their own purposes.

Protecting their user's privacy was such an afterthought that their website in 2008 didn't even have a privacy policy which violated the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003. When they finally did add one it said that they sold your data to third parties for marketing/consumer research and used it to push ads at you for "health clubs, weight loss programs and sports and fitness equipment"

Ultimately what they built was just one more shitty ad platform that exploited people's personal data for the benefit of several third parties at the expense of their users. It's no wonder that they got bought by Google, the ultimate ad platform that exploits people's personal data.

It's such a shame, because they had an opportunity to create something useful that worked for the people who paid for the product instead of turning those paying customers into another product to sell. The fact that they were exploiting people's health data just made it even worse.

I've never owned a FitBit and have often warned others to avoid them. Initially, I'd recommended pedometers that worked just as well (if not better) without the spying and ads, but these days wearable devices are capable of doing a whole lot more and it's still hard to find ones that respect their customers enough to let them control their own data and prevent it from being sold to data brokers, governments, and ad companies.

I'm sure the FitBit will always be viewed as a great success story, but all I see is a tragedy and a lack of ethics.

> refused to allow users to download their data > instead of having it uploaded to FitBit's servers

I download my monthly data from the fitbit server into LibreOffice. I have about 2 million steps on my fitbit. I have csv files going back to 2019 ever since I purchased the fitbit. They've made a nice dashboard, with some badges. I share the dashboard with friends, bit of a social competitive streak. If I were to directly download the data from the fitbit to my ubuntu desktop, I would have to write a fileparser & then make a dashboard & all that...not interested. I want to walk, not do software in my offtime.

They could just as easily given people the option to not use their website while still letting those who wanted to use it. Whatever google does now though is a different story entirely.

My personal preference back in 2008 would have been the ability to pull raw data off the device, but also for it to include an accompanying CD with some basic software to generate pretty graphs or whatever locally. It'd be easy enough to text/page/email a friend with the number of steps I logged for the previous day, or even write up something that would let us share/graph our results together. Admittedly, I actually do enjoy writing software in my offtime though. I'd like to think that if if things had been different there'd have been several open source options for visualizing, tracking, and sharing FitBit data for those who couldn't or didn't feel like writing their own.

Fitbit didn't sell ads or user data. We were entirely reliant on revenue from device hardware sales, which is why you saw the attempts to pivot into subscription revenue in the later years.

Data export could have been more accessible, but it was available via the website and web APIs. Fitbits grew to be much more than a basic pedometer, and many features needed post-processing on the backend servers.

Really interesting read! I was one of those first 5000 units (preordered Sept 29 2009 and shipped Dec 29 2009) and I wore my fitbit religiously (upgrading to newer versions now and then) until last year.

>> "That something had to be comfortable to wear all day, be easy to use, upload its data seamlessly so the data could be tracked and shared with friends, and rarely need charging. Not an easy combination of requirements."

I ended up finally retiring my fitbit last year after seeing little by little Google dismantling all that made fitbit fitbit. Google's first version of Fitbit was the Pixel watch which didn't even last a day. It also may have been comfortable to wear, but was not comfortable to use and the social aspects of it, namely challenges, were axed. So all you were left was a device with the tracking aspects and upload aspects. Not great.

I ended up moving over to a Garmin fenix 7X Sapphire Solar which has a very impressive battery life, fits way more comfortably, has way more features, and while still not the same challenges I loved on fitbit, still has better social features then google left the fitbit with.

All in all, while I do love my Garmin device now, it was a very sad day leaving Fitbit behind. I still hold that, while unproven, I think I probably logged more days of data on the fitbit at the time I switched over then anyone else. I now know I have a 1 in 5000 chance at least of this being true!

>> "In April of this year, Park and Friedman left Google. Early retirement? Hardly. The two, now age 47, have started a new company that’s currently in stealth mode."

Excited to see what you guys are working on now!

I loved my fitbit zip a lot!! Unfortunately, the smartwatch trend took over fitbits too and all of them are now just smart watch types.

The thing is I am a vintage watch enthusiast and I only wear vintage mechanical watches. Thus, leaving no room for smart watch both from a space point of view and fashion point of view.

Hence, my options are quite limited when it comes to pedometer. I either go with cheap alternatives (which are quite accurate btw), or none at all.

I wish fitbit brings back clip-on devices as a first class citizens in their lineup.

If you just want a simple activity tracker then something like an Oura ring works well enough.

Great article and a really interesting history of the company. I first heard of FitBits (and activity trackers in general) while working in Singapore in 2010; I met up with a hacking group that had a few FitBit enthusiasts.

I had no idea until this article how close that was to a) the product's initial launch and b) the product's actual manufacturing site.

The few latest generations of fitbits have a really low record of reliability I guess they still have a lot of things to learn.

Google doesn't care. people will buy them based on the Fitbit name, good quality or bad.

They used to be reliable until Google bought the company. I'll never buy another piece of Google hardware after my last Fitbit. It lasted 18 months and they declined to replace it since their warranty is even shorter. I refuse to buy disposable electronics.

Interesting, I believe this although I stopped using mine many generations ago after losing it and not replacing it. I feel like there's been a big shift in recent years from Fitbit being a market leader to people preferring other wearables - either smartwatches like Apple's or Garmin's, or more use case-specific wearables like Whoop or the Oura ring for sleep.

I worked at Salesforce years ago on a customer support product they were using. They mentioned many people never used their Fitbit, but still somehow a third of users had to contact them over a hardware issue.

That made me think basically everyone who used it heavily eventually had a hardware problem.

That was one of the best articles I've read in a long time. Thank you! A great overview of the toil and complexity of creating a new company and deploying a new product.

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