from the why-we-can’t-be-good dept
For the past few years, I’ve been using Cronometer as my nutrition app. It’s pretty good for tracking food, exercise, and more. I appreciate that it has very detailed nutritional data, and even if it is not, I can upload the nutrition label just a quick photo on my phone. It’s a nice app.
So I was very surprised last month to receive an email from a company saying that they no longer have a contract with their former data provider, a company called Trustwell, and because of that, the company has to delete previously recorded data from past meals that I have entered.
We are writing to let you know that our former food data provider, Trustwell (Formerly ESHA), requires us to remove food from our database. We believe his position is inappropriate and in violation of US law. However, we are in the process of removing Trustwell food from our database.
Such deletion will occur no later than February 15, 2025, and may be required to occur earlier based on Trustwell’s actions.
It then informs me that I need to delete data from two meals I have entered, both of them from last April. The company recommends: “If this old data is important to you, we recommend finding the item in your diary, and replacing it with an alternative from the database before removing it.”
It doesn’t matter much to me anymore since I don’t really care what I used back in April, but the whole thing seems preposterous. There are no intellectual property rights in nutrition data. In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Feist, I don’t see how anyone can claim copyright in that data. In Feist, it is about phone numbers in the phone book, purely factual data (in this case, phone numbers) cannot be subject to copyright, even if someone collects them in a single database. The same principle applies to nutritional data – these are hard-to-get facts, not creative expressions.
It is possible, as some have suggested to me at Bluesky, that there is a contractual agreement between Cronometer and ESHA to delete any data once the contract ends. If such consent exists, it should be limited to the database itself, not the person recording the data into a private journal. Because it’s not a “database” that’s copied into people’s tracking journals, it’s just factual data about certain foods. In addition, the user is not bound by any terms contained in Cronometer’s contract with others.
However, after digging into this story, some more details emerged, including ESHA suing Cronometer in September over this. The lawsuit alleges that the agreement between the two companies was that Cronometer would only use ESHA data for “its own internal analysis” and not make the data into a product. Chronometer’s answer to the lawsuit says it’s all nonsense. Note that the company immediately helped Cronometer implement the database into publicly available software, that the two companies are in regular contact about it, that ESHA employees told Cronometer how excited they were to review the app, and how ESHA even asked Cronometer if they could release it press about integration.
Even more to say:
The ESHA co-founder then downloaded a publicly available copy of Cronometer
software and praise Cronometer for using the ESHA database in the software,
thanks Cronometer for “playing by the rules.”
Either way, it’s another unfortunate example of the world we live in where digital services mean everything you care about can be taken away from you.
The reality is that this seems to be another thing that private equity is destroying. The email states that Cronometer had a previous deal with ESHA, which is now Trustwell. It appears that the new name is the result of a merger between ESHA and FoodLogiq, which was carried out with a combination of investment from private equity firm The Riverside Company. It seems entirely possible that after the merger, Trustwell has made it more difficult/expensive for an app like Cronometer to use its nutrition data, and now either demands more cash or removes the food already logged in from the user.
Indeed, Cronometer said in a legal filing that the private equity thugs who put together Trustwell really just wanted to break their deal with Cronometer so they could build a competing app:
What actually underlies this lawsuit is not a “secret” “scheme” by Cronometer,
who use the database is always open and publicly recognized by ESHA.
However, this lawsuit is part of a scheme designed by Trustwell and its investors to create a
monopoly for one other product: Food Processor®, their diet tracking app
competing with Cronometer products. This claim is supported by private infusion
equity money that bought ESHA and formed Trustwell. That is a private equity investor
seeks to monetize investments by illegally supporting Food Processor®
market through the pursuit of baseless litigations against small companies like
Cronometer to scare them out of the market with the threat of substantial legal
expenditure.
Once again, this is why we can’t have nice things.
Filed Under: copyright, data, fair use, food tracking, nutrition tracking, private equity
Companies: chronometer, riverside company, trustwell
