Fitbit users are unwittingly sharing details of their sex lives with the world | Hacker News Reader

Fitbit users are unwittingly sharing details of their sex lives with the world

thenextweb.com

102 pointsbond51 comments

I think it's crazy that they by default share when you have sex, for how long, and how hard, but that they decided that weight and bmi information should be private.

Weight and bmi are information about you. Sex and other activies are information of your activies. It's simply grouped as it should be.

And that comment right there is why programmers shouldn't design social networks.

Indeed, it's why they should grow an ethical/moral portion in their brain as well -_-'

Being a professional doesn't mean you should ignore ethical or moral concerns.

Yes, with the notable exceptions of the designers of like, every successful social network ever.

"To be is to do" - Socrates

"To do is to be" - Sartre

"Do Be Do Be Do" - Sinatra

"yabba dabba doo" - Fred Flintstone

They don't. When I created a fitbit account, I chose whether or not I wanted my profile public. Then, when I want to log an activity, I enter in a name and duration for it.

So if I choose to have a public profile, accessible to the world (which was clear to me when I signed up), then I choose to make an activity called "sexual activity", it's indexable and publicly visible.

To be fair, the only reason this info is public is the person is 'tagging' the activity. By default all tagged links in delicious are public and that makes sense. If you tag an activity like this on fitbit, you should mark it private.

I have a fitbit and I can't for the life of me figure out why people would start tagging every activity they do and start and end times... but if they are adding tags, comments, and other personal details they should mark it all private.

When I saw the headline, I wondered how the machine determined that you were having sex, rather than just doing (for example) pressups, squat thrusts and crunches (possibly in close proximity to another user doing similar exercise). It would have to be an exceptionally subtle piece of accelerometer/resistance meter interpretation to distinguish the difference.

wastedbrains' reply told me exactly what I needed to know. Fitbit users are not "unwittingly sharing details of their sex lives", but deliberately marking their exercise sessions with their very personal trainer as games of hide-the-sausage; using a tool that is designed to publicly share information about ones exercise sessions.

Seriously: who cares?

If I'd had the exhibitionist inclination to publish my jogging and TV watching habits, I would not mind having the duration of my sexual activity published as well. Who cares? It's not like having sex is something top secret nobody else does.

But since I would not want to publish all my questionable efforts to stay in shape, it would probably be a good idea to make the public/private setting a little more obvious.

Really, again? When I have an own opinion here that does not follow the mainstream, I just get downvoted without any arguments. Why is it so bad to have your sex duration published but its okay that your jogging performance visible to the world?

The question is how the users feel about it. How the users should feel about it is irrelevant.

Animals have very strict rules and regulations about the sacred act of rubbing genitals together.

And humans have been endowed with brains to get around instinct controlled behavior that is not useful.

"Why is it so bad to have your sex duration published but its okay that your jogging performance visible to the world?"

They are completely different. Maybe not to you but if you can't see how it would bother some people then you're not thinking very hard.

They are completely different to me as well, which is why I don't record rumpy-pumpy on runkeeper, or wear my HRM/Cadence/GPS watch for it.

They are evidently not completely different to the users of fitbit who are telling the world about it, because otherwise they wouldn't be overtly and deliberately stating (on a website whose purpose is to share activity details with the world) that any particular 2m52s of increased activity was due to squelching.

Please let me know if I've missed some crucial point regarding fitbit usage, because I really can't see how this is "unwitting".

It's pretty easy to just inject activity and other data for other people too. Fitbit doesn't really seem to give a damn about any sort of privacy or authentication.

http://www.openyou.org/2011/04/18/fitbit-and-security-or-lac...

On a public account on Daytum.com I once came across a chart in which a couple seemed to be logging their sexual positions, including "what what in the butt."

Daytum is pretty much anonymous are far as the end user goes, there's no name or "social" information to an account, but it was pretty funny and doubt they knew other people could see that data.

Ripe for data-driven visualization.

http://daytum.com/robynt/categories/191024

Actually it isn't very anonymous at all. From a few minutes of looking at that account I know both of their first names and their address (also the name of their cat).

Since they will probably block this soon and get Google to flush its public cache, here's are some examples (with user tokens redacted):

Google results: https://img.skitch.com/20110703-r79t4swrjt3e2akwh3xdfbcrsg.p...

Part of a profile: https://img.skitch.com/20110703-cwmhwiicewy6hh5xw67ctwrq7m.p...

Appears to be blocked now

Though still available in google's cached pages. Still for the dozen or so I have looked at, most of the users who chose to share their sex lives only did so under an alias with no picture or a pictures that you could not see the face. You really have to give these users a little more credit.

The real question is: what can we do with the data?

Surely google can use this as a search signal?

... or integrate it into Google+ recommendations.

Hm. If two people were fitbit users, google could automatically +1 depending on the duration. I predict a new saying: "I'd +1 that".

Collect dataset of low sexual activity people, connect with Facebook, analyze users Like and Commenting patterns and then build a Facebook dating app that suggests local deals, and activities with other low sexual activity folks.

Or: collect dataset of short sexual duration people, spam with virility supplements.

Instead of the normal find any email address and spam with virility supplements?

So are you suggesting a startup called Groupsexon?

Correlate all data with foursquare too, and on the morning after, send an email with the subject like "Know what Robert really likes? Chocolate. Here's where to get a brand that's like his favorite but he never had it."

That's not the real question at all. If the website didn't explicitly state that this information would be private then it is a privacy issue.

I will note that a lot of people aren't all that savvy/don't really think about the consequences. People have been fired for posting remarks on their Facebook account that their employer then read. People seem to routinely underestimate just how public stuff on the internet is and both users of a site and administrators commit big errors in that regard. In online forums, I have seen someone post a thread that from the get go was obvious to me was trouble and would likely attract negative attention from the folks it was trashing. Did any of the moderators step in up front and do something about it? Nope. They stepped in only after trouble had come to their door to crab at the person who started the thread. I think the person who started the thread genuinely did not expect the outcome that resulted -- they posted as if among friends/talking with a group of friends, apparently oblivious to the fact that anyone with an internet connection could find these public remarks, join the forum, and reply.

I'm aware of this issue and still sometimes run into friction over it. The internet allows us to belong to many more social groupings than in the past and it gets complicated trying to determine what info and how much to share where/with whom...etc.

I don't think users think their data is secret. I think they assume nobody will care enough, or be malicious enough, to seek it out and exploit it. There's an expectation of courtesy that (mistakenly, sadly) gets ported over from meatspace.

I mean, I leave my shades up all day, with the assumption that the neighbors won't have their faces up to the glass to track my movements around the house.

It can tell that you're hugging and kissing with just an accelerometer? And it doesn't matter where it's attached to you?

I don't know if the author intended to imply that, but I don't read that any place in the article. It does mention entering data for times when wearing your device is inappropriate.

That said, I don't think the thing could possibly tell the difference between jostling around on a ladder and hugs-n-kisses.

Sort of reminds me of Blippy sharing credit card numbers, except that was by accident not design

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/26/blippy-credi...

I think it was the intention of the author to remind you of Blippy, since they specifically mentioned them in the next to last paragraph by linking to an article about them.

Is it only Americans that see this as a problem? Let me be the first European to redundantly point out that sex is natural and nothing to be ashamed of. So what's the big deal? How many more years will it take the moral (majority?) to get over the way our bodies work.

I can't say for sure, but as a Greek-American living in Denmark, I don't think any of the three nationalities I have contact with would be particularly happy about a publicly broadcast log of every time they have sex, especially if they didn't realize it was happening. Sex might be natural, but publicly posting a sex-diary is unusual at best.

sex has more social implications than other body functions.

e.g., someone notices their partner logs sexual activity shortly after "meeting with friends from work" every thursday.

there are less dramatic examples any adult should be able to imagine.

actually, i suspect you just jumped at the opportunity to parade how "progressive" you are.

I don't see the problem of this. It's something you decided to share.

Your example is pretty odd. Why would you log entries of your sexual activities which are not considered ok in your relationship?

Sure, it can have social implications but I don't feel going overprotective on this. You should know where you log stuff which you consider sensitive.

I think the graying out is a bit harsh for anything that gets negative points, but okay.

The negative points, well, that seems to happen any time the state of the union (it's not so good) ie the state of the US, is mentioned by me. What % of users are American? Probably higher than I realised. In future I'll work on the theory that comments that work from a position of superiority don't get anywhere. They seem to make even leftcoasters and NY-ers leap to the defence of Alabamians' values. Surprising. Or do users just dislike any discussion of politics here?

I was a libertarian uber-capitalist and totally pro-US, until, like most people, I noticed that the entire political class of most rich nations are working for the financial sector, which is not, by the way, the same as working for the technology sector. Now, I'm at least a leveller and pro a quite equal OUTCOME of income in a society. Way to go Dick Fuld (et al.) Who needs fascism when you've got an oligarchy of Wall St.

Hey, darling, as a european feminist sex-neutral naturalist queer socialist, I tell you, you just replaced libertarianism with nationalism. Stop that.

And now to the annoying part of telling you exactly why you're wrong:

1. Unless you're working for Berlusconi sharing your sex life details with your management and/or press is probably going to get you in trouble. Even in Europe. For some values of "Europe" it's more like "especially in Europe".

2. We're not living in a perfect world. In a perfect world, there would be no implicit difference between "I pronged a bell pepper today" and "I sneezed today," at least not in the "how much people would ridicule you for that" department. We are not living in a perfect world, deal with it.

3. Because of 2 and 1, there is a significant difference between the reasonable expectation of publicness of statements like "ate a cheeseburger, vigorous effort, 15 seconds" and statements like "sexual activity, active, vigorous effort, 5 seconds." Ignoring said difference make you an a... I mean, a person generally considered unpleasant.

4. Yeah, in Europe too.

I'll try to be brief. It'd be nice if you read your old comments, so that you see this. I'm not going to login to hackernewsers to contact you.

I didn't (mean to) conflate nationalism (pro-US) and libertarianism. America is more libertarian than anywhere. It's obsessed with having a small state. I used to agree with that, the uber Thatcherism, anglo-saxon model. Now I don't. The Labour government embraced a caricature of being pro-business, leaving us with no stable banks. Even Lehman was doing its most suicidal and socially irresponsible stuff through it's London office while Gordon Brown kissed its ass. Nobody has disputed my point that governments are now mere facades of the banks behind the curtain. This revelation changes all politics, but the average voter hasn't noticed.

My first reaction was "So fitbit allows me to lifelog and PROVE that I had 75 minutes of sex today". Sign me up! That's not a bug that's a feature. I don't care even if my grandmother can read it. She'll approve anyway.

If facebook allowed you to do posts like x fucked y today, I'd love it much more. I know why people don't like that level of boasting and "over"sharing, which not even fetlife manages. It's because they don't see any status (or seek it) in broadcasting the fun you're having to the old schoolfriends in your friend list. I do. So they can see that I did grow up. Here's me in my private pool. Here's my model girlfriend. Yes, social networks ENABLE narcissism. It's only a bonus if the guys who bullied us are noticing this from their backbreaking job.

10 "I am only this way because have what YOU have made me." - Pink

long-nurtured bitterness? insecure? arrivist? vainglorious? hypersexual?

Guilty as charged. Unless you have some way of subverting the tendencies that are wired into human psychology. Goto 10.

If someone is techsavvy enough to be on this site, but isn't on fetlife because they're being modest / private / discreet, I'd still diagnose a shame complex of sexual hangups.

If they aren't on it because they're not kinky (enough), then that's even easier - they're boring. I just dont get it. You've got the amazingly good luck to have corporeal form, for a limited time, in a random universe, and you're not going to do those things with it. Baffling.

(actually, browsing old threads might become hard fairly quickly. Not that I'm not interested in them, but this medium makes that hard. I miss Usenet. I mean, it had its share of problems, but it made this far easier).

Um, what, boring? No, I have a lot of things I could do, even with my body, that don't include probing orifices. Actually, probing orifices offers only so much novelty, and at some point the appeal is much more based on the partner and physical/emotional closeness than the exact probing equipment and configuration.

As for nationalism -- fun fact, the office I worked in Europe is 90% male. I had the pleasure to work in a similar, corporate office in the US (the same corporation, actually). The proportions were much closer to 60-40 or close to that. Libertarianism is only a part of US, and not all US. Just by calling US libertarian and assigning all accomplishments to EU you become a nationalist. When EU worked on worker rights (which had some support from US as well), welfare state and other things that we're currently in the process of getting rid of, US was working on gender, racial and religious equality, political correctness, and a lot of other stuff that I don't feel like researching right now but US is probably trying to get rid of.

And, right now, Europe has a lot of its own problems with nationalism, racism, neoliberal economic politics and all that. We may have made some good decisions in the past that enable us to point fingers at US and say "haha, we've done X better than you", but so did they. Also, we have countries that are monarchies. Seriously. In 21st century. No kidding.

Yes, Europe is not superior in every way. I just think that while all banks, even French and German ones, were getting away with murder, it was UK and US govts who were really asleep or involved. France and Germany has had bailouts, but nothing like as bad. Canada, Australia and Sweden needed none.

Monarchies are pretty ridiculous. The British one takes in more money from stupid Japanese tourists than it costs. So there it stands.

Yes, probing, as you call it is eventually boring. But I never mentioned it. I go way beyond probing. Those other activities are (though)-- irrelevant to fitbit, because it'd never be able to identify them. They'res hundreds -Maybe you should start here: http://www.londonfetishscene.com/wipi/index.php/Category:BDS...

I'm more interesting than the people I was at school with are now. I don't mind demonstrating that via the net. In fact, I was more interesting when I was at school too, had I realised it. But Intelligence Equals Isolation. Most of them weren't worth the effort of trying to be popular.

Let me be the first European to apologize for the totally unfounded holier-than-thou post in the parent, and confirm that also in Europe it's complete abnormal to share a public log of your sex life ('abnormal' as in 'the vast majority of people don't do it and strongly object if they found out they had been doing it on accident', not as 'deemed clinically insane' or so).

And if the parent disagrees, I challenge him/her to link to his/her log.

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