Advocacy group Noyb on Thursday filed complaints towards Google-owned Fitbit in Austria, the Netherlands and Italy accusing the health monitoring firm of violating the European Union’s Basic Information Safety Regulation (GDPR) privateness regime.
Vienna-based Noyb (None Of Your Enterprise), the digital rights group based by privateness activist Max Schrems, has already filed a whole bunch of complaints towards large tech corporations starting from Alphabet‘s Google to Meta over privateness violations, some resulting in large fines.
Fitbit forces its customers to consent to knowledge transfers exterior the EU and doesn’t present the likelihood to withdraw their consent, violating GDPR’s necessities, Noyb stated.
Fitbit sells watches that monitor exercise, coronary heart fee and sleep. It additionally gives a subscription service beginning at $9.99 (almost Rs. 830) a month.
“Provided that the corporate collects probably the most delicate well being knowledge, it is astonishing that it does not even attempt to clarify its use of such knowledge, as required by legislation,” stated Bernardo Armentano, knowledge safety lawyer at Noyb.
Fines for violating GDPR guidelines can attain as much as 4 % of a agency’s world annual income. Google’s annual income was $280 billion (almost Rs. 23,15,350 crore) in 2022.
The advocacy group desires Fitbit to be pressured to share all obligatory details about the info transfers with its customers and permit them to make use of its app with out having to consent to the transfers.
Whereas GDPR permits each particular person to withdraw their consent, Fitbit’s privateness coverage states that the one option to withdraw consent is to delete an account, which implies dropping their beforehand tracked exercises and well being knowledge, Noyb stated.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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