Jawbone tracking bracelet

Jawbone's new bracelet, called "Up", tracks your movements, sleeping patterns and eating habits, then transmits the data to an accompanying cellphone app. Just what I've always wanted!

• [Victor Drath]

  Play-Doh. It’s made from play-doh.

• [Jeremiah Cornelius]

  Yeah, yeah.

  How utterly predictable. First Lindsey Lohan gets one, now all the kids want in on the act.

• [hassenpfeffer]

  The sad thing is I have at least three doctors who’d love me to wear this thing and have the data transmitted directly to their offices.

• [Nword]

  How in the heck can it “keep track” of your eating habits?

• [Moriarty]

  And the targeting of ads gets more and more precise.

• [wolfwitch]

  Is it going to be ridiculously overpriced, or will it actually compete with the Fitbit?

• [irksome]

  See I took this literally, like it would be a device to measure how long someone has been flapping their damn jawbone.

  That’s how we told people to shut their piehole when I was a kid.

• [MollyMaguire]

  To my mind, the main incorrect assumption with this and fitbit is that calorie tracking will help you lose weight. What you eat is way more important than how much you eat. Track grams of refined carbs and sugars, not calories.

  • [Chevan]

    That’s not an incorrect assumption at all. Calorie restriction is an incredibly useful tool for weight loss.

• [Tdawwg]

  The routinization and commodification of the 24-7 surveillance state continues apace. “Upload biometric data to your smartphone” = “transmit private data about your body to your portable tracking device.” What could go wrong?

  Dystopian snark aside, this post, from Gizmodo, deserves to be repeated here:

  Onlooker “You sure seem to have a lot of vigorous arm movement right before you go to bed”

  Me “Um, yeah.. I was waving goodbye.”

  Onlooker “Every night?”

  Me “Yes, every night. I love saying goodbye.”

  Cheers to GalacticPope, Internet poet.

• [jonathan_v]

  if you always wanted something like this, why didn’t you buy a fitbit?

• [rebus]

  Arrests up sharply as more people are removing their Up bracelets in protest of the latest hike in the oxygen consumption fees.
  The fee, instituted when Industry and Government joined to counter the growing oxygen starvation zone, is due to rise seven percent this Summer, the fifth increase in the last three years.

• [randomguy]

  Anonymous Spy Chief:

  I love it. The people will track…themselves. Mwuahahahahahaha.

  • [Anonymous]

    and paying for it themselves, MUA HA HA HA HAHA

• [Anonymous]

  Retail? Mark it up a few hunderd percent. Medical or law enforcement? Mark it up many thousand percent.

• [Anonymous]

  Feedback loops change behavior. EVERY diet and excersize routine says to keep a log. This makes that log effortless. YES there are privacy concerns, but this isn’t MANDATED, it’s going to be available. And since the device isn’t even out yet, accusing it of letting others snoop on your medical data is a bit premature.

  Privacy concerns are valid, a cheap easy feedback tool is a GOOD thing generally.

  RGB

• [EeyoreX]

  You all realize that this is the premium version, right?
  But you can get the more basic version for free in most states, if you’re a first time offender:
  http://www.lcaservices.com/pages/equipment.html

  Future gererations won’t even be able to comprehend that Chuck Palahniuk started out as a satirist.

• [Anonymous]

  3 or 4 shell companies down, the CIA owns Jawbone.

• [Anonymous]

  Coming from a smart phone near you…

  “I see you took a huge dump, here is a coupon for a dollar off of a 36 pack of Charmin brand toilet paper!”

• [Rob Beschizza]

  You tell it when you’ve eaten by belching loudly into the mic; it deduces what you have eaten by comparing your belch’s waveform with an online database of belches, grunts, and so forth. It can even tell what you’ve been drinking from the fluid dynamics of your sick passing over the sensor.

• [ScottTFrazer]

  This is another time when I just don’t understand the general BB poster mentality. Sure having someone else collect that data about you without your knowledge or consent is creepy, but are you telling me you wouldn’t be interested in collecting it yourself? With essentially no effort?

  • [Anonymous]

    I think it’s selection bias. It’s like when Apple was publicly revealed to be tracking locations. I say publicly because it had been pointed out in a book and conference material six months before it blew up in the media. A number of people scream bloody murder. It seems like a big deal and you get Al Franken demanding answers and hearings. But a larger number of people dump the contents of the log and post it on Facebook for everyone to see. The guy in the next cube at work tracks all his meals on public website. Which allows me or anyone else to know everything he eats. One person’s security breach is another person’s opportunity for self expression. Who am I to say which one is wrong?

    And I think part of it is opportunity for outrage. The “child rapist to be provided child porn in jail” headline that has been floating around the media the last couple of days has been a good example. The headline states a pretty horrible situation, that terrible material is being given to a terrible person. So a normal person gets the endorphin kick of being outraged. But the reality of the terrible situation is that the individual is serving as his own lawyer and has a legal right to evidence against him, which is child porn. (Pardon me while I vomit a little) And he will be supervised by guards while viewing the material and will not be able to take the material to his cell.
    The full story backs away from the tabloid nature of the headline.

    My next example is the incandescent light bulb argument going on in the House of Representatives. It’s not about the light bulbs. There is no ban. It’s a efficiency standard that was written in collaboration with industry. There are many exclusions and the more efficient bulb is still incandescent. But it has been turned into “the government is going to make you buy CFL’s at gunpoint”, next they’ll want your guns and your apple pie. It is an opportunity to make people angry for no real reason. Because angry people vote. And they vote stupid.

    And while I’m venting my spleen… The attacks on Michelle Obama for eating a hamburger, fries and a shake are another good example. She does a photo op and eats a high calorie meal. Somehow this invalidates her work on childhood obesity. I think this a text book example of the “Al Gore uses electricity and flies in planes, therefor there is no anthropogenic climate change” meme. It uses a false notion of hypocrisy to attack your opponents message. You can’t win in this argument. Any deviation from a straw man version of purity is used against you. And if Al Gore lived in a yurt full time without electricity, running water and the carbon footprint of a ladybug they would simply attack him as a crazy person who lives in a yurt. Coal deregulation for everyone. Kind of like when they made Candidate Obama’s conversation about arugula with arugula farmers into some elitist attack.

    And thank you for this opportunity for me express my outrage. The cycle continues.

  • [Chevan]

    Exactly. I’d love to use this kind of technology for my own curiosity. I’m not a fan of the bracelet form-factor, as I don’t like keeping things on my wrists, but that’s just implementation. The basic technology beneath it is still interesting.

• [desiredusername]

  Does it know when you masturbate?

  • [Anonymous]

    no it doesn’t, but we know when you do!

  • [Anonymous]

    Not if you use your foot.

• [quickbrownfox]

  When will you internerds get over the fantasy that the government cares what you’re doing 24 hours a day? I mean, obviously, if you’re planning a bank heist maybe you shouldn’t use one of these (though it could make for a great alibi if, say, you put it on your dog while perpetrating your misdeeds). But otherwise, seriously, what’s the concern?

  • [Anonymous]

    Look, I’m DOING STUFF, OK? Doing. Stuff. Get it?

• [fxq]

  It will only become a run-away success when it tweets that you’ve had a bigger BM than any other guy in your office.

  • [Lobster]

    Do I smell online leader boards? Because I definitely smell something…