Here is a short story about Tanita Weightcheckers and how NOT to provide a service:
– in the first days of January 2013 I bought a Tanita BC543 scale. It also came with a companion iOS app where you could save your data
– I used the scale + app on a regular basis (2-3 times/week) to track my measurements and improve my shape
– I also used the web interface (weightcheckers.com) to have a better view of the graphs

– Now comes the ‘fun’ part: starting February 6th 2014, the iOS app is no longer working, the website redirects to an online store for scales, and, worst of all, all the measurement data is gone

– I contacted the customer service via Twitter, the contact form and phone. They confirmed me by phone that all the data is deleted, and the iOS app is gone.

So here we are, a company decides to delete all the user data without any prior announcement and without any possibility of recovering the data.

This really makes you think about the data ownership. I always tried to own my data: that’s why I am using this blog instead of facebook/tumblr/forums/any other publishing service; that’s why I am backing up my tweets in Tweet Nest, that’s why I am performing daily backups to Dropbox, that’s why I keep local + cloud copies of all my photos and videos. Luckily for me, I also have a copy of my measurements data. I made it just the day before the deletion, and it involved some Chrome DOM Inspector work.

So, despite the incredibly poor customer service from Tanita, this story has a happy ending for me. I have all my data, and this inspired me to create my own data input + visualizing tools. I will follow up to this 🙂

Update, 15 February 2014: I created my own fitness tracker