Google says it’s closing the Fitbit acquisition—uh, without DOJ approval? - Ars Technica

There used to be a Google Fit website, which like Fitbit, would present all your stats from a big dashboard, but Google killed the Google Fit website in early 2019 after years of neglect.

Neither Google Fit nor Wear OS was mentioned a single time in the announcements from Google and Fitbit Thursday.

A big question about the Fitbit acquisition, like the Nest acquisition before it, is what Google will do with all of Fitbit's data.

Google's side of the story is laid out in the blog post, with Osterloh saying, "This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we've been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users' privacy...

Fitbit users' health and wellness data won't be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data." Google also says it won't do anything crazy with Android, like lock all Android phones exclusively to Fitbit wearables, which apparently was something the EU was worried about.

The EU's part of this is here and mostly says the same thing, noting, "Google will maintain a technical separation of the relevant Fitbit's user data.

The data will be stored in a 'data silo' which will be separate from any other Google data that is used for advertising." This sounds a lot like the data-separation pledge Google has for Nest, where Google says it will "keep your video footage, audio recordings, and home environment sensor readings separate from advertising." The EU also says Google is committed to letting third parties access Fitbit data through the Fitbit Web API.

Existing Fitbit data certainly needs to be protected, and you can delete your Fitbit account here if you would like to do that.

Going forward, though, Fitbit's fitness tracking and Google's Wear OS fitness tracking are so similar that Google is not really getting a new data stream from Fitbit acquisition.

Google will gain more users thanks to the existing Fitbit user base, but as we've already said, that's not very big since all the competitors have moved in.

If we follow the Nest story, which only merged with Google in 2018 after a failed few years as a standalone Alphabet company, big changes are probably coming for Fitbit users.

Nest users saw the Nest account system get killed off in favor of a forced migration to a unified Google account.

As a brand, Nest was hollowed out and used for Google's general smart home branding, replacing the Google Home speaker line, smart displays, and Wi-Fi access points, while still being used on original Nest products like thermostats, cameras, and smoke detectors.