Another day, another data spill.
This time, the story concerns Fitbit, a San Francisco start-up that makes a personal fitness tracking device.
Users of the service wear the small device to track their physical activities. They can also enter information on the service’s website about other aspects of their lives, such as their diet and, yes, their sex lives (e.g., logging how “vigorous” each encounter was).
The idea is to use the service as a motivational tool to help users to lead more active, healthy lives.
The problem is that the service set users’ profiles to “public” by default, making their sex lives searchable via Google.
Someone spotted this over the weekend, and details of the searches made it across several tech news blogs.
As a result, Fitbit CEO James Park spent his Fourth of July scrambling to change all of the service’s users’ default settings to private. In addition, Fitbit also removed all personally identifiable information from users’ profiles and asked the major search engines to remove the indexed profiles from their pages.
“We are dedicated to making this the best fitness platform possible with users in full control of their data,” Park wrote in the company blog about the situation. “For many people, sharing information is an important motivator for them to achieve their fitness goals. We will be in touch with our users about new choices they will have when they want to share information.”
As Forbes’ Kashmir Hill notes:
Out of a desire to have a successful “social strategy,” too many companies are choosing to publicize their users’ information as much as possible. This Fitbit privacy #fail illustrates once again the pitfalls of that strategy, when users naturally assume that if you give them the option to track their bedroom activity that you would only give them the option to do that privately.
Park noted in his company blog post that users did have the option of making the data private. The issue seems to be, however, that the settings didn’t seem to be finely tuned enough to share and be competitive about some aspects of your life, and not others.
The event is notable not only because it’s embarrassing, and it highlights the danger of default privacy settings, but because personal data tracking in many different forms is becoming quite popular among some of the more influential people in the tech world.
As business strategies evolve and grow with social media as a central component, this is the kind of thing we’re going to hear more about as time goes on.
