Sexual Activity Tracked By Fitbit Shows Up In Google Search Results

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Leena Rao Jul 3, 2011


Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable. You can click here to access these results. The Next Web reported this earlier this morning.
As you may know, the Fitbit Tracker is an compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket and captures, through accelerometer technology, information about daily health activities, such as steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, exercise intensity levels and sleep quality. Users can also log nutrition, weight, additional activities (including sexual activity) and other health information on the site in order to gain a complete picture of their health.
So why are Fitbit users’ profiles able to be searchable in Google? It’s not really Fitbit’s fault. When you create a profile, the default privacy setting allows profiles to be found in search results (Google, Bing, etc). If you don’t unclick this setting, it will obviously make your profile public for anyone to find.
So these users may be unwittingly sharing their most intimate details (i.e. kissing, hugging and more) when recording their sexual activity to calculate how many calories they have burned in a given period of time.
Of course, sex does count as exercise, but you might want to think twice before recording it on Fitbit and making your profile open to the public (TMI, anyone?). And to mitigate this issue, perhaps Fitbit should change its privacy defaults.
Thanks to Andy Baio for the tip.

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Reminds me of the case where the wife of a university professor asks another professor of that university about his experience with viagra as she was considering asking her husband to use some... on Facebook! Much to the delight of the students...

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Perhaps Fitbit is right and some people reluctant to embrace the cyberworld are wrong. Rooting can be a strenuous exercise. If both partners (or in more exotic scenarios, all partners) are agreeable to have it added to their calorie burn charts, where is the problem?

If DSK had subscribed to this program it could have avoided much confusion.