Hacker News Reader

Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

It shouldn't matter. It says it can read your heart rate. That's what it advertises as. It should be able to do so.

I'm curious if there are legal precedents on how accurate a thing must be to advertise as a being a measurement device.

This is a bullshit argument. They do read your heart rate. But they explicitly say that it isn't up to a medical or diagnostic level of reliability.

Everything has some level of quality or tolerance expected. Car parts break all the time, it is just a normal part of owning a car. You don't get to sue a car company when your battery dies and you need a jump. You only get to do it when there is a significant or dangerous breach in the guarantees that they actually made, even if only made implicitly. Fitbit explicitly does not rate themselves for that purpose.

Maybe your experience is different from mine then. My device was inaccurate enough to be useless. Further there doesn't seem to be any allegation that people are expecting it to have a medical or diagnostic level of reliability. That seemed to be a throwaway line in OP's article, not something core to the lawsuit. As far as I can tell from other news sources, they are suing because it can't read heart rate for crap.

You're exactly right. "Diagnostic level" of testing would tell you the difference between 120 and 121 bpm. Fitbit would read 85 bpm. That's not even close to right, which means it's completely useless for what it's marketed as.

With the same logic as Fitbit, my watch tells reads my heart rate. Right now it's saying my heart is beating 9:21am. Sure, that's not as accurate as a real medical device, but it's a number so it's in the right ballpark.

Actually it's quite unlike car parts breaking. Car parts have infant/random failures and wear-out failures. These kinds of failures are usually a very small percentage of the total number of devices shipped.

Fitbit's HR monitor fails to provide accurate readings whenever you move on almost everybody. What they don't do is advertise that you have to be still to get an accurate reading. Fitbit is marketed in such a way as to make you think it tracks HR during motion, I'd say it's not the same as a car parts that break at all. It's more like lying by omission.

This is not a bullshit argument. It is similar to labor laws in some states. You can claim someone as a indy contractor but if they are working with your tools or at your job site or under your instruction ... guess what? some states don't care what you call them ... they will be processed as employees not contractors.

Not bullshit.

If there were a special tax on heart rate monitors that _are_ medical devices, and FitBit was calling theirs not a medical devices to avoid paying that tax, then the analogy would be reasonable.

The whole employee/contractor thing is all about payroll taxes. You have to pay them yourself if you get a 1099, but your employer pays them if you're on a W-2. Employers have a much better track record of paying that, so the government wants to avoid too many 1099s.

I've been a contractor before. I got a W-2, but no benefits. Now everyone is happy.

Where do they explicitly say that? I poked around their site and all I could find was mountains of bragging about how awesome their heart rate measurement technology is, and a few disclaimers about how it might not work if your activity involves rapid arm movements, like boxing. But maybe I missed the other disclaimers.

All mobile phones advertise calling. All of them warn that they are not meant for emergency calling.

Is that true? That would be rather odd given that they are required by law to be capable of it, to the extent that it has to work even when you don't have an active mobile account for the device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com