The Straight Dope: Do fitness trackers pose a privacy risk?

[View this message as a web page]( [The Straight Dope]( 02/17/2017 Dear Cecil: I bought a Fitbit for my company's health challenge, and I was surprised to see how it could not only monitor steps but also track sleep, calories, and resting heart rate. This made me wonder what other information about me could be learned from these data. What are the privacy concerns? I don't care if my employer knows I ride my bike 50 miles a week, but could they know if someone was at the bar until 2 AM? — Dennis Hussey Cecil replies: A nosy boss snooping on your off-the-clock peccadilloes may be the least of your worries. Fitness trackers can upload a nearly complete record of where you've been and what you've been doing during your every waking moment — and then how soundly you slept at night, too. As police and judges recognize the evidentiary value of such data, it's possible that every step you take can and will be used against you in a court of law. For more, see: [( STRAIGHT DOPE STAFF REPORT — 10/26/2000 Dear Straight Dope: My understanding of space is that it is a vacuum, i.e., devoid of pretty much all matter, just empty space. Also from my amazingly limited knowledge of physics I understand that in order for a force to create movement it must act upon something. So if a spacecraft fires its rockets into space, a vacuum, what is this force is acting upon? If there is nothing there, what are the rockets pushing against to cause the ship to move? Just something I was thinking about because I have way too much free time, your infinite wisdom would be much appreciated. — Coulter, UCLA SDStaff Karen replies: Don't take this personally, Coulter, but you're no rocket scientist. You're also not the first person who has failed to achieve Zen with Newton's Third Law. Back in the 1920's when Robert Goddard was fathering rocketry, a New York Times editorial dissed him thusly: "That Professor Goddard with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." About what you'd expect from a daily newspaper. For more, see: [( STRAIGHT DOPE CLASSIC — 06/18/2004 Dear Cecil: I just finished Dan Brown's best-seller The Da Vinci Code, about a thousand-year-old conspiracy involving the Catholic church. While the modern murder mystery part of the book is obviously fictional, you're encouraged to believe that the historical background is authentic. As a Straight Dope reader I know otherwise, so I'm not going to ask about hanky-panky between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (unlikely), the Holy Grail (a literary invention), or the Priory of Sion (too much like the Illuminati). What intrigued me was phi, also known as the Divine Proportion, a mystical ratio the book claims shows up everywhere in nature and art. I remember enough about the golden section and Fibonacci numbers, which also figure in the book and are related to phi somehow, to know that some of this is legit. But phi itself is new to me. What's the straight dope on this magic number? — Ryan Joseph, Chicago Cecil replies: Brown's exegesis of phi — for that matter, his whole book — is so cartoonish that you're inclined to dismiss it out of hand. (To cite one egregious example of his imprecision, he continually refers to the painter of the Mona Lisa as "da Vinci." As anyone with a semester of art history knows, the man's name was Leonardo; da Vinci merely refers to his birthplace.) Phi is a cool concept, though, and Lord knows I don't get many chances to expound on higher mathematics and dump on a fellow scribbler at the same time. So what I'll do here is go through Brown's often loopy assertions and follow each with the facts. For more, see: [( YOUR AD HERE! Your direct line to thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet, plus a few total dipsticks. For rates and details contact Rich at [rhummel@suntimes.com](. Copyright © 2017 Sun-Times Media, LLC. This email was sent by The Straight Dope, Sun-Times Media, LLC., 350 N. Orleans, 10th Floor, Chicago, IL 60654 [Unsubscribe/update preferences]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. To change or update your newsletter subscription preferences, or to unsubscribe from all Chicago Reader and Straight Dope newsletters and promotional communications, [click here](. Please allow 72 hours for this change to take effect.