Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced it was purchasing Fitbit for over $2 billion a few days back. This a huge win for Alphabet and Fitbit, but not for us, the consumer. It is thanks to a shriking number of large corporations that consumers are left with little choice in the form of mobile phones, search and browsers. And thanks to these same companies we will also be left with a lesser number of choices in this consumer space, the wearable trackers.
If you look at the data, you’ll see that by volume of sales, Fitbit was on a losing streak when compared to the leaders, Apple, Xiaomi and Huawei. So it’s easy for a cynic to suggest Alphabet “saved” them. And this point I cannot contend as I am not familiar with their financials, I can only argue that by purchasing Fitbit, Alphabet, which already rules the mobile phone, search and browser markets, have taken a monumental step towards having complete access to our lives.
In these days, nobody can get around without a mobile phone. We use them for everything and anything. From the mundane, like getting directions to our location and looking up restaurants; to the more productive, like responding to business correspondence, updating spreadsheets, etc.; to the more fun, like playing games or browsing social media. If someone had access to our mobile phone usage data, they’d be able to very quickly figure out what we do for a living, when and where we work, where we vacation and certainly where we live. Not to mention getting access to our bank information and any little secrets we may have.
This applies to the browser and search markets. Access to that data lets a company see and understand a lot about its users. The only thing that people use more than a mobile device or a browser is a wearable. A wearable is with you at all times. It can track everything you do, always.
This is why, having options in this space is so important. Wearables are the final frontier. They can very easily be extended to transmit more about you than you thought possible. It would be trivial for a hacker or a digital security company, to gain access to a wearable and modify its code in such a way as to transmit your location, sleeping pattern, record conversations through its microphone, and even infer passwords and PINs through recordings of the device’s accelerometer.
I am not suggesting Google will do this. I am suggesting that by placing all of our digital eggs in the same basket, a bad actor would only need to hack one account to gain access to our complete digital lives. We are placing our trust in a smaller and smaller number of companies. It the digital age, it is not a question of if companies will get hacked, it’s a question of when. And when they do, the biggest losers in the ordeal will be us, the consumers and users of their services. And if you think you will be compensated by any incompetence on the part of the companies, think again. Remember the Equifax breach? People affected were offered a couple of years of credit-monitoring (through Equifax) or $125.00. And the latter offer was only if there was enough money in a pool of cash they had set aside for payouts. In other words, if enough of the people affected chose the cash payout, the figure of $125 was more like $25 if you were lucky.
The point is that we cannot continue to place all of our trust in these large companies. And our government should not have allowed the sale of Fitbit to Google.