Google announced plans to buy fitness tech firm Fitbit for $2.1bn back in November 2019, but the deal has since been subject to regulatory scrutiny. Now, 14 months on, it has been completed.
One of the talking points in that intervening period has been privacy: what Google might do with all the data on Fitbit users’ activity and health. As the deal closed, Google’s SVP of devices and services made pains to reassure people.
“This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we’ve been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users’ privacy,” he promised. “We worked with global regulators on an approach which safeguards consumers’ privacy expectations, including a series of binding commitments that confirm Fitbit users’ health and wellness data won’t be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data.”
There’s a music angle here too: Fitbit has its own Peloton / Apple Fitness+ tier of video workouts – Fitbit Premium – while its devices have supported streaming services like Spotify too.
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