Your Data is Yours for a Price

I've recently blogged about how I think personal data should be owned by those generating it.  Related, I was just thinking about how long I've owned my fitbit - almost a year - and that I was going to have to write a post summarizing my thoughts on living with a fitbit for a year.  As part of that, I was ready to bitch and moan that they do not provide their users with access to their own underlying information.  To make sure this was a true statement, I did some quick Googling.

What I found was not very satisfying on a few different levels:

1. Access to your own data is only available if you a premium subscriber - that is, you pay an additional $49.99/year (after you've already bought the device).
2. Even when starting a seven day free trial period to download the data, it is only available with nothing greater than daily granularity.  A bit of poking around on the Google Group for fitbit developers indicates that only a "select few" developers will have access to sub-daily data.
3. The data is presented poorly - there are three separate sections in the CSV: body, activities, sleep.  All are keyed on date.  Why not one section with more columns?
4. The data has odd inconsistencies:
1. If you request dates for which you hadn't used your fitbit, you will get information that isn't real - i.e., no minutes of activity rather than null values
2. For data where you have limited entries - weight, blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., fitbit does different things: weight is repeated, blood pressure is 0/0 instead of NA, resting heart rate is 0 instead of NA.

I'm still down on the whole environment that is out there now.  That said, I signed up for a MeetUp group (for DC) that is associated with the Quantified Self.

After I've had a chance to go through the data, I will share my insights (if any).