Google is now inviting Fitbit users to log their blood pressure into its Health app—the same company that just paid $10 million for 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 100 million emails, and a mountain of internal documents from a dead airline to train its AI.
The pattern is not subtle. Google wants your health metrics, your workplace conversations, your emails—anything it can ingest to feed its algorithms. And once that data sits on Google's servers, Americans have no real guarantee it won't be sold, shared, or eventually used to price your insurance or deny you coverage.
Fitbit Air owners have noticed a new option appearing in their Google Health accounts: blood pressure logging. According to Android Police, the feature allows users to manually input blood pressure readings from a separate monitor and track trends over time. The Fitbit Air itself still cannot measure blood pressure—but the infrastructure to collect and store that data is now live. Android Police framed the rollout as "good news" and expressed hope that actual blood pressure monitoring would arrive soon. What went unmentioned: who owns that data, where it goes, and what Google—Fitbit's parent company—can do with it.
Meanwhile, Google is proving just how hungry it is for data of every kind. Business Insider reports that Google's plan to acquire a vast trove of data from Spirit Airlines—which shut down in May—has cleared a major privacy hurdle in bankruptcy court. Google won the bid at $10 million for access to 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 100 million emails, and other internal documents, all intended to train its AI models.
The sale was held up over privacy concerns. One hundred twenty-one members of Congress, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, raised alarms. A court-appointed privacy ombudsman recommended approval after personal information on 97 million Spirit customers was excluded. Aviation unions withdrew their objections Monday night after reaching a deal with Google that excluded employees' medical and disability history, drug and alcohol testing records, and payroll data. The Association of Flight Attendants called it "an historic win for worker privacy protections."
Sara Nelson, international president of the AFA-CWA, declared: "Worker data privacy in the age of AI has become a whole new worker's rights issue." She's not wrong. But notice what's still in Google's hands: half a billion workplace conversations and 100 million emails from people who had no say in this fire sale. Google told Reuters it was "not looking to buy any personal information from Spirit" and that data would be "de-identified by an independent third party" before Google receives it. The company did not respond to Business Insider's request for further comment.
Put these two stories together and the picture comes into focus. Google is building the plumbing to collect your biometric data through Fitbit while simultaneously buying up the private communications of a defunct company's workforce. Every new "feature" is another inlet. Every bankruptcy auction is another reservoir. The question isn't whether Google can de-identify your data—it's whether you should trust a company this ravenous for your information to hold it at all.
Congress can write letters. Unions can carve out exemptions. But the data keeps flowing one direction, and ordinary Americans have no seat at the table where the real deals get made.
