(Semi-Recovered) Data Ownwership

I'm still not comfortable about not being able to access my Running information in Nike+, but I'm happy that Apple has a different perspective on this and the data that my phone is capturing from my daily activity is available for me to download and use.

So, I managed to export the data from the Health application in my iPhone. The first part of the process is quite simple: Enter the app. Click the Health Data icon at the bottom of the screen. Click the export icon at the top right corner. Confirm Export. Define how you want to export. In this case I selected the email option and a ZIP file was sent to my Inbox.

The ZIP file contains an XML document that in my case had information for the past 9 months (last time I had to format my phone) organized in over 22 thousand elements of an XML tree. From this structure, I will highlight a few attributes that I think are the most relevant:

• _type  The measure that has been recorded, peg. StepCount, DistanceWalkingRunning, etc.
• _unit  The unit of measure that is being used, peg. count, km, etc.
• _value  The amount, degree or size that was counted for this measurement.
• _creationDate  Self explanatory
• _startDate  The starting moment for this reading
• _endDate  The ending moment for this reading

It's interesting that the app does not measure activity homogeneously and the timing in between each observation can vary from a few seconds and up to 40 minutes, although on average it makes a reading every less than 4 minutes.

I converted the XML tree into a table, I reorganized it a little bit (see the final version here) and I can finally have the same graphs as on my phone (you can drill down the horizontal axis to see the information by Month, Week and Day). The information is not as rich as in Nike+, but it is available and it is mine!

(Lost) Data Ownwership

I've been consistently running since 2008, but I've only tracked my runs since 2011. Back then, I used an iPod nano to keep the records and later it all got stored on the Nike+ Run platform.

 

My 2016 totals

A few years later I had my first iPhone and I started using the Nike+ application on my mobile. I've been  very happy with this tool and although I recently tried moov and Strava, I didn't find enough reasons to migrate. However, I also came to reflect about the 5 years of data that I've loaded into Nike+, it's richness and how I'd like to access this data and do my own analysis.

I browsed the Nike+ platform and I did a quick internet search, but I couldn't find an easy way to download my data. I found some apps that claim to do the trick, but I wasn't too confident to install them or provide them with my Nike+ login/pwd. I also found a couple of pieces of code that would supposedly recover the data, but I wasn't bothered to test them and decipher what they really do.

I never read the small letters when I started my Nike+ account and I guess that I'd have registered anyways (or maybe not if I there had been a Strava integration with my iPod), but this make me think who is the owner of the data. I'm still a fan and a daily user of the app, I'm OK with Nike knowing my running habits, but not letting me export my data leaves me thinking... Who really owns the data? Nike+ or myself?