Google/Fitbit Risks ‘Serious Harm to Society,’ Warn Consumer, Citizen Groups
Google’s proposed $2.1 billion Fitbit purchase (see 1911010051 or 1911010054) raises “serious competition and privacy concerns" and risks harming people in the wearables, advertising and digital health markets, warned 19 global consumer and citizen groups Thursday. “This takeover must therefore…
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only be approved if merger remedies can effectively prevent those harms.” The groups said they fear Google could shut rival manufacturers out of the wearables market by “degrading their interoperability” with Android devices. The takeover also risks jeopardizing rivals’ access to wearables data in “digital health markets to the detriment of innovation in these critical nascent markets,” they said. It would bolster Google’s “unparalleled market power” in online advertising by giving it “a further data advantage in the personalisation of ads through its ownership of Fitbit’s user database,” they said. Regulators need to get Google to commit to conditional “safeguards,” they said. U.S.-based groups included New America's Open Technology Institute and Public Knowledge. Google didn’t comment.