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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

It seems that these days you should assume that any product which needs an Internet connection to function is going to phone home through that. There's certainly a market for "smart, but not too smart" devices; unfortunately I doubt it's very large.

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It's another reason why I quite using fitbit. There is no reason at all you need internet connectivity to send the data 3 feet from the device to the phone via bluetooth. They don't need to collect the data at all, and since there is no opt-out, I just quit using it.

When I worked in San Francisco, my employer gave everyone fitbits and held weekly "most steps" competitions. I wore mine for three days before realizing the device was telling my company which hours I was most active.

Needless to say, I never won any of our competitions.

We bought a fitbit for a relative, I took the feature "no smartphone required" to mean it would work standalone (or at least offline with your laptop) but of course I was mistaken.

Did you replace it with anything ?

No. I go on regular walks on a regular route, so I know how far it is after using it a few times. I don't really need to know down to the step how far I walked each day, just that I at least did what my goal is.

Actually with fitbit there is a reason. You can install the fitbit app on multiple devices, and your tracker can sync with any of them. The internet connectivity is basically so they can keep a single source of truth so that your different devices don't get out of sync. This becomes even more true if you have multiple fitbit devices on one fitbit account (or indeed if you have it set to use your phones inbuilt pedometer stuff)

Great, let it be an option for those who have more than one device instead of forcing everyone?

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