Awesome idea giving them crappy data. I do the same thing with loyalty programs. Someone has already registered XXX-555-1234 as a phone number in your area code. I like to think I'm adding a little bit of chaos to their data tracking.
Trying to get it done before the economy tanks, I think. We're vastly overdue for a downturn, the economy was already over-juiced due to excessive tax cuts/etc, we just put five million households out of work for a month (most of which are contractors and will not even be getting back pay) and will be doing it again in less than two weeks (now that the Superbowl is over and we're not messing with FOOTBAWW we can get back to our regularly scheduled shutdown).
The US economy is extremely likely to slide into recession in the next 2-6 months. And when they do, it'll be a lot harder to get $7 billion for a knockoff IRC client.
It has been a few very good years for raising cash from private investors, but that is now slowly reversing. Best to IPO now while the stock market is still mostly bullish.
It's not a baseless assumption that fitness trackers abuse access to people's private data. Maybe your particular fitness tracker doesn't today. That doesn't mean others don't.
And I am - for argument's sake - agreeing with the notion that privacy violation happens when the online service does something "wrong" with the data, not when the online service demands to keep their own copy, for their own uses, as a precondition to using the software.
History has shown that software that sends as much data home as possible can simply not be trusted with that data. Fitbit is one "innovation" or management team change away from further abusing the access to their user's data. I don't mean to coldly disregard the fact you trust your employer. But if I want an accurate assessment I can't care. Facebook employees trust Facebook.
My employer was being lumped in with a currently existing privacy violation. I won't argue much against hypothetical future possible privacy violations. I'll just point out that web-based email, your credit card company, and whoever installs software on your smart phone overshadow privacy implications associated with fitness trackers.
The difference is that all of that is public information. The kind of tracking that Facebook and Google are doing is not explicitly public information. They infer secrets about your private life from little bits of "innocuous" data that you sweat away during your everyday activities.
Just tried this for several people I know. It only kinda-sorta gets things right. It generally gets the name right and sometimes the address.... but not much else.
