This article was published on July 4, 2011

Details of Fitbit users’ sex lives removed from search engine results


Details of Fitbit users’ sex lives removed from search engine results

As we reported yesterday, users of the physical activity tracking gadget Fitbit had their profile information, including details of their sexual activity, indexed by Google and easily accessible via a quick search.

Embarrassment all round for both users and Fitbit, then. Luckily, despite the long Independence Day weekend in the US, it appears that someone at Fitbit spotted the furore yesterday and has acted fast. Now the search that previously revealed information like “Moderate effort” in users’ sex lives returns no results.

A check of Fitbit’s robots.txt file shows that it is set to disallow access to /user/ and /users/ URLs, indicating that the company quickly acted to block search engines from indexing this data, although it hasn’t discussed the episode via its Twitter account or blog as yet. A swift resolution to a rather embarrassing problem.

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