Fitbit Profile Sexual Activity Shows up in Google Search Results, What Else Could?

This sounds a little Facebookish: the default setting for the FitBit device is to place information on the web. Users have to “uncheck” the box to be private. How many that are using Fitbit are tracking their sexual activity, and does this count for exercise with calories burned? Last year a guy hacked his Fitbit so he could have his information directly instead of going through the web interface. Google Health, which is now going away, does allow for the information to be input.

This sounds a little Facebookish: the default setting for the FitBit device is to place information on the web. Users have to “uncheck” the box to be private. How many that are using Fitbit are tracking their sexual activity, and does this count for exercise with calories burned? Last year a guy hacked his Fitbit so he could have his information directly instead of going through the web interface. Google Health, which is now going away, does allow for the information to be input.

Some folks feel different about the automation of collecting and made this comment below.  You can also sleep with a Fitbit on and maybe this is how some of the sexual activity snuck in here?  Also, we have the sales and marketing again with data so what are they selling and to who so thus the hack mentioned above. 

“Manual collection of information means the collector is focusing on the data (whenever collection occurs) and has the opportunity for short reflections, and can keep abreast of the data more easily. We have found that completely automating collection removes these opportunities and can actually hinder individuals in keeping track of and making sense of their data.”

This was a good find over at Tech Crunch and They said it was not Fitbit’s fault totally but I’ll disagree a bit there as we are talking some HIPAA guidelines so cheers to all of those burning their calories and you might want to check with your security settings and while you track exercise with Fitbit, do you really want to sleep with it?  To each their own. 

Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable. You can click here to access these results. The Next Web reported this earlier this morning.

When you create a profile, the default privacy setting allows profiles to be found in search results (Google, Bing, etc). If you don’t unclick this setting, it will obviously make your profile public for anyone to find.