Google Closes Fitbit Deal Despite Privacy Antitrust Worries

Last updated: October 15, 2026

Google has completed its $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit, the company that has shipped roughly 120 million devices in 100 countries since 2009. The deal closed Thursday, 14 months after it was first announced.

Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic approved it after Google made a series of binding commitments — most importantly in Europe — promising not to use Fitbit health and wellness data to target ads.

At a glance

• Google closed its $2.1 billion purchase of Fitbit on Thursday.
• The deal was announced 14 months earlier and immediately triggered alarms.
• About 29 million active Fitbit users are now under Google's hardware umbrella.
• Google committed in Europe not to use Fitbit health data for ad targeting.
• A separate U.S. Antitrust trial targeting Google's search business is scheduled for September 2023.

What Google promised

Rick Osterloh, Google's senior vice president of devices and services, wrote in a blog post that the deal was always about "devices, not data" and that Google "would protect the privacy of Fitbit users" from the start. The European Commission approved the deal after Google offered a package of commitments, including not using Fitbit health and wellness data for Google ads, ring-fencing that data in a separate datastore, and granting EU regulators oversight and audit rights.

Whether those commitments hold up over time is a separate question. The data now sits inside the same hardware empire that runs Pixel phones, Nest cameras, and Android — and Google already collects location, search, and email behavior from billions of users every day.

Why it matters

For privacy advocates:** Fitbit knows your heart rate, your sleep schedule, your weight, your menstrual cycle, your run routes, and (in some models) the stairs you climb. Combine that with location history, Gmail, Chrome browsing, and YouTube watching, and you have one of the richest longitudinal health-and-behavior profiles assembled on a single ad-supported platform. The European Commission extracted binding limits; the U.S. Department of Justice did not.

For enterprise IT teams:** Fitbit devices will move deeper into Google's hardware ecosystem — Pixel phones, Wear OS, Nest, ChromeOS — and every Fitbit that syncs to a phone becomes a logging endpoint inside Google's first-party data perimeter. Companies that already manage Pixel deployments for staff will, intentionally or not, absorb Fitbit data flowing through managed devices. The practical question is not whether this data matters to Google, but whether your compliance posture accounts for it.

For the broader antitrust picture:** The DOJ has scheduled its landmark Google case for September 2023. The Fitbit deal is not the centerpiece of that trial, but it is in the exhibit pile. Google is not simply acquiring a fitness brand — it is acquiring a hardware footprint, an installed base, and a recurring data stream. That is exactly the bundle the DOJ argues already gives Google too much use in adjacent markets.

What to watch next

Three threads. First, whether the European Commission quietly audits Google's Fitbit data silo in the next 12 months — that audit will be the first real test of the commitments. Second, whether any U.S. State AG files a privacy suit specifically tied to Fitbit data, similar to past actions on biometric data. Third, watch the September 2023 antitrust trial. Even if Fitbit is a footnote in the docket, the discovery period will expose how Google actually values the data it just bought — and that valuation will tell every privacy advocate in Washington what the company's internal math looks like.

Key takeaways

• Google closed the $2.1B Fitbit acquisition despite antitrust pressure on multiple fronts.
• EU users have binding data protections; U.S. Users have a corporate promise.
• The bigger case is the September 2023 DOJ trial; Fitbit is part of the evidence, not the headline.