Lawsuit targets Google for allegedly burning Fitbit owners

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It hasn’t been a great couple of months for Google-owned Fitbit. The company recently announced a recall of its Fitbit Ionic smartwatches after reports of burns. Now, the entire Fitbit lineup is the target of a lawsuit claiming that they are all prone to burning customers.

The lawsuit, initially discovered by The Verge, claims that all Fitbit devices have a chance to overheat and burn customers, not just the Ionic line.

The two plaintiffs involved in the case experienced burns from the Versa lineup. And the lawsuit includes photos of burns from users with several other Fitbit watch models. We’ve included an example further down, but it is a bit graphic, so proceed with caution if you are squeamish.

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“Reasonable consumers, like Plaintiffs, purchase the Products to burn calories – not their skin,” reads one line in the lawsuit. Pretty good opportunity for a solid pun.

It looks like Google could have potentially avoided this lawsuit had the company recalled all Fitbit watches. But that would have likely been a logistical nightmare and Google may not have been aware of the dangers in other Fitbit watches (though that seems unlikely).

Instead, the company only recalled the Fitbit Ionic series, leaving itself open to this lawsuit. However, the suit interestingly also notes that the company has been slow to act on its promise of offering refunds to Ionic owners as part of the recall.

The suit was filed on April 29 in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California and Fitbit has yet to respond to the claims.

As we all know, things like this tend to take an incredibly long time to work out, so it could be a while before we hear anything else about this lawsuit.

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