People familiar with the matter said on Thursday that Google\’s $2.1 billion bid for fitness tracker maker Fitbit will face a full-scale EU antitrust investigation next week.
To help it target ads in an effort to address EU antitrust concerns, Alphabet Inc unit Google this month offered not to use Fitbit\’s health data. The introductory of a full-scale investigation suggests that this is not adequate.
The deal would see Google contend with market leader Apple and Samsung in the fitness-tracking and smart-watch market as announced last November, along with others like Xiaomi and Huawei.
One of the people said that the European Commission, is expected to make use of the four-month long investigation to explore in depth the use of data in healthcare, which will launch the probe following the end of its preliminary review on August 4.
The Commission decided not to comment. Google restated previous comments, saying the deal is not about the data, but devices.
A spokeswoman said, \”The wearables space is crowded, and we believe the combination of Google and Fitbit\’s hardware efforts will increase competition in the sector, benefiting consumers and making the next generation of devices better and more affordable.\”
Google\’s data pledge has drawn criticism from healthcare providers, wearables opponents and privacy advocates for not addressing their concerns that the deal would boost its supremacy in the online search market and its assortment of data.
The first to report the imminent EU investigation was the news agency MLex.
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