Sense sleep tracker maker Hello is shutting down
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
If you're considering buying a device that depends on a service, send an email like the one below first. And if you're starting a hardware company, start thinking about this from the beginning. Even just explicitly stating that the device will stop working if the company ceases operations is better than not telling consumers anything.
Separate but related: https://twitter.com/hello/status/603941261201043456 was someone requesting an API back in May of 2015, then many more responses requesting the same thing.
Subject: Provisions for Sense devices if Hello fails
First off, congrats on making a fantastic-looking device. I have a somewhat unusual question about Sense devices, in the wake of Basis's failure and shut down.
Obviously Sense is very well capitalized right now. What provisions has Hello made for the continuation of the product if Hello the company fails?
For example, have you committed to at least open-sourcing the protocol specs, if not necessarily your implementation of the server? https://twitter.com/hello/status/603941261201043456 doesn't inspire much confidence that the device is meant to survive Hello's failure, nor that Hello is considering this at all.
I think it wouldn't be too difficult to diassemble/modify the Hello Sense App to redirect your data to a custom server that at least logs the received data. Would anyone else be interested in making this happen to have an option when the servers shut down? Otherwise, the app won't work at all.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getpebble....
I don't think engineers are as innocent in that regard as we'd like to believe.
1) Basically piped everything through their own servers, including a huge amount of personal information, and
2) Had very careful weasel-wording in their privacy policy which gave them carte blanche to store and then sell any data they had about you.
It's possible that they didn't track this stuff and were just covering themselves, but I had quite a long email conversation with one of their lawyers about it, and despite me explaining clearly multiple times what my concerns were (data collection, resale of personal info) and them having multiple opportunities to simply say "we don't store your personal data beyond X days and we won't sell it", they never gave any meaningful response to either concern.
After that experience I have no choice but to assume the wording in the privacy policy is deliberate and that they weren't operating in good faith (from a privacy standpoint).
The sad thing is the cloud is totally unnecessary for product function in 90% of these cases. I had a Coin. I never put any actual credit cards on it because I didn't trust a hardware startup to keep my financial info secure "in the cloud." I only used it for magstripe loyalty and gift cards. Now I can't even use it for that because the phone-app no longer works, because they failed and they shut off their servers. The hardware still works perfectly, though, it's just nearly useless.
(in a strong conflict of interest they wouldn't find a way to make an initial transaction)
I think for things like sleep tracking the real problem is that people don't care about it in the large numbers required to lose money on the devices and make it up in the spying.
This business model is why I avoid IoT startups and actively discourage people from buying their stuff. Until IoT becomes "Intranet of Things", most of those devices are best considered as scams.
I'm probably hoping too much if I want them to give me a way to root my Sense as well as an open source version of their server software I can run and point my Sense to.
It's unfortunate that Hello are shutting down. I was thinking into buying Sense for my bedroom, despite that I'm using different app, mostly because the aesthetics.
I'm with you on hoping that they open it up to allow for a private server. If that happened then I'd be tempted to write a new iPhone app for it, it won't be long before the existing app will need updating to work with new iOS versions (Although it seems to work fine with 11). That being said, I'm not incredibly optimistic of a release of either a rooted firmware or protocol spec. It's a shame, it had real potential, it makes me wonder if it failed due to poor marketing or just too shallow a customer pool for this sort of device.
So when the service is shut down my expectation is that I won't be able to change any of my device settings. Not to mention that the room data and sleep data will be unavailable.
Open APIs and the option to run a private server are great, but the device should retain some bit of functionality if there's no network.
The app only communicates with the Sense device via bluetooth when setting up its WiFi connection, everything else goes through a web API to the company's servers.
I haven't tried, but now I wonder if the alarm even works without an internet connection.
Open APIs etc. help to some degree, but realistically very few people have the expertise or the inclination to setup a home server for some sensor.
The latest crop of devices have been single-person-only, for example Alexa, so I assume it doesn't work at all for non-single people, but maybe there's some interesting magic going on in there to support multiple people.
I wonder what this kind of hardware thinks of pets.
You get a married couple, a housecat or two, maybe a dog, the data stream must be very interesting to filter.
Edit: Someone has done a hardware teardown: http://lyndsaywilliams.blogspot.ch/2015/07/hello-sense-sleep...
Mine was a review model. I found it was OK for what it was but I never really did anything with the data. Oh, I went to bed too late last night? Well, I kinda knew that.