"Just" make a new single use Google account. And what, do this for every new product, service and use-case we want to ensure doesn't get joined together? It's so cumbersome to work around today's data-hungry Googlesphere. Google would rather take another decade of yearly $4B fines than build systems that respect our personal information.
See, that's exactly what I mean by "concrete". You seem to be saying it's unreasonable to create an account just for the purpose of using a Fitbit. But you've always had to do that. It is literally exactly what a Fitbit account is. For ten years, nobody has thought that it's unreasonable. Like, the only distinction is that now you get to choose whether to create a separate account or reuse the existing one.
If you can't actually formulate why the migration of the account system is bad thing, maybe it's actually not?
Creating accounts for other companies is easier than creating a new Google account, though.
I tried to create a new Google account for a webservice that only allowed third-party logins:
The account was requiring a phone number immediately after creating it. After begrudgingly entering a phone number (that was, to be fair, already used with another Google account - I don't have random burner phone numbers lying around), the account was locked due to "unusual behavior".
(This was a Google account with an existing mail address from a normal mail provider, no new Gmail account, btw.)
In contrast, most "normal", non-SV companies don't even ask for a phone number as a hard requirement, yet alone decide your fate by ML algos.
It is the undisclosed consolidation of information sources that Google holds that scares me. I think most considered Fitbit account a small privacy issue. The Google ecosystem on the other hand is enormous, highly entwined in our lives, extremely intrusive, and information collection & sale is done surreptitiously.
I think most, even non technologist feel the negative in this, even if they cannot articulate it.
But again: how does the account system switch matter for any of that? Like, what is the thing that's suddenly possible for them to do when you log in using a Google account rather than a Fitbit one? If they're willing to maliciously (and at ludicrous risk for low payoff) do some kind of cross-account sharing of health data for unrelated purposes, why would it be any harder to associate a Google account with a matching Fitbit account, than to associate two Google accounts?
You seem to be making an argument, in vague generalities, for why they shouldn't have been allowed to buy Fitbit. But that deal was approved by the regulators across the world, after concessions, so there is no point in relitigating that. Is there a concrete argument for why they should require indefinite support for a legacy account system?
There is a pretty obvious reason for why people cannot article why they feel negative about this... Because they are feeling negative about something else entirely, and projecting. But this particular change is be strictly an improvement: it's going to be much better to argue against the things that actually bother you, not use this as a proxy.
We can simplify the situation quite well and avoid the projection. It's too late to do anything about the acquisition, but Google is too powerful and too shady to begin with, and should be vigorously opposed in anything it does or tries to do by default on that basis alone.
I have no doubt that Google knows who is using multiple accounts/devices and they'll stuff your dossier with data from all sources.
If you're wearing a device that knows when you're asleep, awake, fucking, or sick and you're sending that data to a third party whose entire business is built on collecting your personal data and you've been viewing that data yourself on a cell phone running their OS you can't care very much about your privacy to start with. Being forced to sign into a google account at that point is a formality.
schroeding also covered this in their reply to your comment, but "just create a new Google account" is much harder than it sounds. I did this for my Sony TV out of a vague paranoia of Google having access to my living room (I de-googled much of my online presence already, and didn't want to invite Google back in). I remember it took a very long time to get past all of the friction Google puts in place to create an account without a phone number.
The difference between that experience and creating a fitbit account is night and day.
