In November 2019 Google and Fitbit signed an agreement for the final purchase of the second by the first . The transaction has a value of approximately 2.1 billion dollars : for each Fitbit share Google will pay 7 , 35 dollars in cash. The objective of this acquisition is to expand Google’s presence and investments in the wearables sector and everything that revolves around its Wear OS operating system, with the possibility that this will lead the American company to develop its own products. hardware.

The European Commission has officially expressed itself in these days giving the go-ahead to complete the operation , however setting some operational stakes. The first, most important, concerns the data of Fitbit users living in European Union countries: they cannot be used in any way by Google to process advertisements .

Not only: the data collected by Fitbit and Google must be separated from a technical point of view , with the obligation to provide European Union customers with a clear choice as to which data related to their physical health that is collected by Fitbit devices is shared with other Google services.

Ultimately the objective of the European Commission is that also following this acquisition the market for wearables devices and those of so-called digital health remains open and competitive , therefore without the creation of monopolistic positions. In this way the EU protects both final consumers and other companies engaged in this sector.