> I find this whole "they're selling your data" trope to be trite and just annoying at this point.
Do you believe it to be mistaken? Or true, but not worth caring about?
Do you believe it to be mistaken? Or true, but not worth caring about?
Its core business is selling products whose entire value would be negated if it sold the data behind them, so it really wouldn't sell the data.
On top of that, I think it's a mistake to say that they are buying Fitbit for data anyway. They are buying Fitbit for a toehold in the wearables market; while this probably has some data value, it's pretty clearly part of their effort to build up direct sales of consumer products as a revenue stream.
Targeted advertising is far from the only thing Google wants data for.
We don’t share information that personally identifies you with advertisers, such as your name or email, unless you ask us to
And "unless you ask us to" is the default behavior of almost all google products. You have to ask them not to, sometimes under penalty of law (GDPR), before they actually change their behavior.