Is there a Fitbit Versa on your wrist? Or do you stand hopeful on your Fitbit Aria every week? Soon your Fitbit life will change something. At least, you are still invited to get active, but since Fitbit was acquired by Google years ago, Google would like to bring a little more of Fitbit under the umbrella of Google itself. This summer, the move of Fitbit accounts to Google will begin.
Fitbit accounts to Google
Before you get into the pen against Google: you get the chance to voluntarily move from Fitbit to Google until 2025, after that it gets a bit more compelling. While some Fitbit users won’t be too happy about it, Google is pretty lenient about how quickly it expects users to make the switch. People are probably more sad about the fact that Fitbit’s challenges have recently disappeared than about the way they will soon have to log in.
Because yes, the question is of course: what exactly will change? How will you log in to the Fitbit app? From this summer you can choose to do that via Google, as you often see on websites. If you don’t have a Fitbit account yet, you will have to log in directly with a Google account from this summer. If you already have a Fitbit account, you can also choose to log in with it for at least another year and a half. Google has said it will make a Google account mandatory when using Fitbit gadgets by 2025.
Google Privacy Center
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel yourself on how to make the switch: the Fitbit app will create a pop-up or other notification in a while with the option to log in via Google. That way you don’t have to worry about losing all your data, because it all migrates along with it, Google promises. If you don’t want to wait for that pop-up, you can also go to the Settings menu and from there choose the new way of logging in. Google sells it nicely: you now only have to use one password to get into your Google and your Fitbit. That saves you having to remember an extra password or save it in your password manager. You will also soon be able to manage your Fitbit data from Google’s Privacy Center. However, we have yet to see whether that is very clear and whether we are therefore moving forward or not.
One of the reasons Fitbit users aren’t so keen on Google is that it already has so much power and data. Soon it will also know when you sleep, when you run, when your heartbeat suddenly starts racing and that is very personal information. If you combine that information with, for example, your Google searches, your emails in your mailbox, and so on, Google will get a very detailed picture. A picture that the weather can use to personalize advertisements. In itself, there are things that Google is not allowed to do with the data at all, and that also applies to the Google Ads data combined with that of Fitbit: that is not allowed. And, good to know, that is not allowed because the EU has decided that.
When exactly Google will start sending out information about that login via Google instead of the old Fitbit account, that remains to be seen, but in any case it will start sometime this summer. Until then (and so actually until 2025) you can continue with Fitbit in the old way. But yes, without those fun challenges, which we still hate.
