Google Buys Fitbit!
Google finally completed the purchase of Fitbit announced in November 2019. The deal was completed for $2.1 billion. On Thursday Fitbit confirmed the news in one of its blog posts. The acquisition was approved by the EU in late December 2020.
Fitbit is an American fitness company that is famous for its products that measure heart rate, the number of steps taken, steps climbed, sleeping pattern, and other metrics related to fitness. Its co-founder and CEO James Park confirmed in a letter that Fitbit would remain device agnostic and it would work for both Android and iPhone. The company shows immense pleasure to join Google in the journey of transforming the lives of millions of people across the globe and ensures that this acquisition would result in faster innovation, better choices, and manufacturing of products that would help people in maintaining a healthy life. Google’s platform would open endless possibilities that would benefit the users of Fitbit.
Google’s senior vice president of devices and services, Rick Osterloh says “This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we’ve been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users’ privacy. We worked with global regulators on an approach which safeguards consumers’ privacy expectations, including a series of binding commitments that confirm Fitbit users’ health and wellness data won’t be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data”. Google also made clear that Fitbit users will have the choice of connecting to third party services.
The concerns related to data sharing have been probed by regulators around the globe and last year this deal got EU regulators’ approval.
Fitbit hasn’t made it clear as to how it will work under Google’s ownership. Will it continue to work as a separate brand from Google or lose its status as a distinct company.
