>Marketing, advertising and making recommendations[.] Your personal data may be used to offer surveys, competitions, discount coupons or events in which you are free to participate. We may provide you with information on our Products, such as new features, sales offers from Withings or our partners, or to announce new Products. You may opt out of marketing offers by logging into your Withings account and managing your notification preferences.
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>Modification of the present Policy[.] Withings may modify the present Policy with or without previous notice, block the access to the website, or change its access conditions
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Will all due respect: eff that. As others have noted here and elsewhere, marketing and advertising -- especially that using my personal data -- is adversarial.
I paid for a thing, just let me have that thing.
And before anyone unhelpfully suggests, "they have an opt-out policy"... well, we all understand that once your intimate, valuable data is siphoned off your wrist, the horse has left the barn, right? That genie is out of the bottle, that bell has rung, and all kinds of other euphemisms that illustrate how the data is no longer in your control, and all the opt-outs in the world are not going to actually delete all your data. It's been forked to Utah, backed up, sharded, "anonymized" and combined with all the other data you've generated on devices sold by other companies -- for every single "partner" that paid them, as well as everyone who did not pay them, in the cases of Utah and corporate espionage.
An actual alternative would be a device that has no connectivity to my pocket surveillance slab or anything with an uncontrollable baseband processor, nor connectivity to the Internet generally. Let me be in actual control.
Thanks for the advice, but I'm sticking with my Casio dumbwatch. Doesn't peep on my daily activities, but it accurately tells time and I love that thing. Bonus is that I have to think about its battery only once a decade.
Well, if the data is never leaving your wrist you will never see any graphs and never actually enjoy the great things a training watch gives you.
Sure they may store my personal data and I would prefer if they didn't sell it to any third party. I would also prefer a product which can store information locally on the phone but never sync it to the "cloud".
The thing is, there is no such products because people are stupid and would be furious if they switch phones and their data was lost on them because they didn't understand that the data was only stored locally and never left the device.
I would buy such a product, if it existed, but it don't AFAIK.
Fitbit stored the same amount of data as Withings do, it's just because Google bought them that people are worried.
Withings is basically a rival to Fitbit and since you don't want the data to ever leave your wrist, this sort of product is clearly not for you.
I think the point I was making is not whether the data is allowed to leave my wrist, but to "let me be in actual control" of my data.
In a world of USB sticks, micro SD cards, and $5 Raspberry Pis, I can imagine human-friendly ways of sharing data that don't involve tethering my wrist to someone else's computer.
> The thing is, there is no such products because people are stupid and would be furious if they switch phones and their data was lost on them because they didn't understand that the data was only stored locally and never left the device.
"[P]eople are stupid"? I'd like to give people a bit more credit. They can move data around, without surprise or fury: plenty still use Ethernet cables, USB sticks, iPod Shuffles, Blurays, etc.
https://www.withings.com/