Sonos is spying on me (and you)
Sonos speaker owner for more than 10 years, and also privacy engineer.<p>This article is largely wrong, on substance, on inference, and on intent.<p>There are a LOT of businesses that create privacy problems in the world. My experience with and read of both Sonos&#x27; business and their privacy policy- what they are doing is not problematic.<p>To the specific points in the piece:<p>1. why does Sonos need location<p>To provide music service choices that are appropriate for the region the owner is listening from. This is necessary from an IP- Intellectual Property- perspective. Not debatable. Please share naive takes on the legitimacy of IP in other fora.<p>2. additional usage data<p>First, some context- as a business, you absolutely NEED to KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS.<p>The most expensive sales are to new customers. The cheapest are to satisfied existing customers. The differences in these costs are often in the orders of magnitude. They are the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. There is no debate about this. It is the nature of business: of sales, of marketing, of user education. If you want to run a business, you have to know whether your products are working for your customers.<p>Now, how do you know whether your products are working for your customers? Here&#x27;s a secret- THEY WILL NOT TELL YOU. Yes, some vanishingly small fraction will complain when something doesn&#x27;t work, or credit you with their joy. But the vast (VAST) majority- between 99% and 99.99%, depending on product and scale and so forth- you will hear NOTHING from.<p>In that context, how do you know whether your product is working, whether they are using it- and presumably enjoying its use?<p>The implicit exchange here- as a user- is between communicating with the vendor, or, permitting the product to provide usage data to the vendor.<p>On this question, people fall on a bimodal distribution. There is a tiny (TINY) fraction who prefers to communicate and not have usage data collected. This fraction can be very helpful, but also completely unhelpful, because they are a vanishingly small fraction, and not representative, of the market.<p>Therefore, in order to run a business, and to know your customers, you have to get the usage data from the product itself.<p>Of course, what usage data do you collect? Here&#x27;s where we get to legitimate interest, probably the most misconstrued part of the article.<p>3. legitimate interest<p>The author of the piece makes a big todo about this, but then bails at the last minute with:<p>&gt; If you read their privacy policy further, you could spot the real incentives and potential uses of the data, but I won’t dive into it here. I do recommend reading it though.<p>Yes- go read the privacy policy. It&#x27;s very well written, describes exactly what and why, in very clear terms. The incentives are- being able to stay in business selling speakers that people like and use without building a surveillance infrastructure.<p>The author also says-<p>&gt; In my mind, most of this collection is unnecessary.<p>Let me be blunt- your mind does not know what is involved in keeping a business alive.<p>Also:<p>&gt; Do they need to collect all this personal data about me to determine what feature improvements would please their customers most? I don’t think so.<p>I&#x27;m sorry. You&#x27;re wrong.<p>Sonos is in fact a great case study. The business did run entirely without any customer accounts or other usage monitoring for the first several years of its existence. Guess what? They were unprofitable, and running out of cash, headed to failure.<p>New leadership, changes in these practices to pay more attention to metrics and usage, and to the market, has enabled them to survive, even when facing increased competition from the tools that are cheaper surveillance vehicles.<p>Sonos is clear that their business is not dependent on advertising or other data harvesting-based business models. One can decide not to believe them, but one should  take that step from a position of knowledge and awareness, both of what is involved in running a business- with a vested interest in having happy, engaged users- and also in the distinctions between surveillance businesses and non-surveillance businesses. The author does not understand these things.<p>The author concludes with some ridiculous recommendations, like<p>&gt; Don’t connect your Sonos to 3rd party services: Sonos would encourage you to give it access to your Spotify account, Amazon, Apple or any other 3rd party music service. You don’t actually need it in most cases. You can use the music service directly, and just play it on your Sonos speaker as a destination (e.g. using Airplay)<p>Not only is this a distinction without a difference- any privacy violation is going to be happening at the 3rd party music service- this is an example of a user being ignorantly hostile to a business they bought a product from.