No tracking
Your health data is your health data. It's personal. Armed with a good data entry tool, you can keep your most personal data reasonably personal.
Fitness Tracker has no interest in your data and is not equipped to collect any without very explicit user consent and strong built in redaction. This would only happen when a user requires technical support and chooses to share their redacted logs with the support team. Otherwise, the application collects absolutely nothing. If you don't believe that, you can do everything but download, upgrade the software and use the in app tool to contact technical support without an internet connection.
This website doesn't collect anything either. You may have noticed that there was no cookie consent modal when you loaded this page. That's because this website does not set cookies. The only analytics software it uses is a very basic tool from Cloudflare that shows the number of visits, country, browser and pages.
It's going to cost sales and makes things like Google Ads a heck of a lot more difficult and expensive that they need to be. But it's the right thing to do - maybe the world should go back to the time that we tracked migratory birds and elk, and not people. But also, this is something I have personal experience with. I'm on my own health journey too and in fact, I've been a user for a lot longer than I have even dreamed of releasing this. Sometimes, you just want to be left alone with your passions and interests without being reminded of the journey you are on. Zero tracking makes that a little more possible.
But it's on Windows
And Windows tracks almost everything. It's an issue - a truly massive issue. But here are my issues:
- Even the most anti-privacy Linux distribution is better for privacy than Windows. But monetizing software for Linux would require me to roll my own distribution. I'd have to handle everything from payment to software keys, distribution and updates. It would involve collecting and using a massive amount of personal information and maintaining infrastructure.
- Monetizing software is important because I don't have enough money to retire.
I have worked for a few companies that distributed their own executables and maintaining the infrastructure was a lot of work. It was enough work that between maintenance and support, it made subscriptions almost financially necessary.
With Windows, my barrier to entry is writing good software and promoting it in ethical ways. I am feeding a system with information it likely doesn't need and I know that's an issue but it's the best I can do right now. But you're right and I can't justify this in terms in my views on tracking on privacy.
So, if you are a Linux user you should get in touch. There's actually a Linux version available but it's barely been tested and while it should work, I'm old and I've heard that about a lot of broken software in my day. I've run it on Ubuntu and it's been quite stable but Windows is the focus right now so your mileage may vary. But if you promise to be patient and provide feedback I can get you going.
(Editors' note - "It should be okay but it might suck and I'm not sure when I will solve your problems" is not a very good pitch for beta testers.)