CEO Reminds Everyone His Company Collects Customers' Sleep Data | Hacker News Reader

CEO Reminds Everyone His Company Collects Customers' Sleep Data

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49 pointsc5karl34 comments

Also don't understand why would anyone buy a Cloud subscription for a MATTRESS. Is that where we are at in the tech cycle? I need to pay 25$/month for... sleeping?

Why does this need to even be connected to internet? Why not keep it local?

(I know why, they had to push for a subscription model for that sweet recurring revenue. That was the incentive, then they add to figure a reason to get there).

> Also don't understand why would anyone buy a Cloud subscription for a MATTRESS.

Coincidentally enough, I bought a new mattress last weekend. When I was shopping for it, fully 1/3rd of the ones they had included bluetooth & app control.

It truly blew my mind. I can't even begin to wrap my mind around the idea that people find these things desirable in a freaking mattress of all things.

I didn't notice if any were cloud-connected (I wasn't exactly looking closely at those mattresses), but if I had seen that, I'm pretty sure my head would have just exploded on the spot.

Does anyone actually find it desirable? Or is it just an easy way to squeeze more money out of a mattress sale, considering they probably sell your data.

In that mattress store, those mattresses were more expensive than otherwise equivalent ones lacking the electronics. I have to assume that somebody is buying them even with the added premium.

Sleep is paramount. Without it, everything else turns to shit. So it makes sense to spend money and time and effort on making it the best it can be. That companies are around to monetize that is just capitalism. There are alternate systems out there but we decided against them.

The part I don't understand is how the electronics makes sleep better. If it looked like there was any way they would, I'd get it (even if it didn't appeal to me personally).

I think regulating temps and giving the user feedback on how well the slept and the details could go a long ways to getting better sleep

Falling asleep is about being comfortable, and an important part of that is temperature. The electronics are used to cool or warm the bed so you get to the right place to fall, and stay asleep. Their website does a good job of selling the idea, anyway.

https://www.eightsleep.com/

> they had included bluetooth & app control.

They’ve already done something similar to that to toilets, not completely though; got it to remote control and batteries yet. I guess wifi and cloud subscription would be next.

conspicuous consumption is a human need.

This appears to be a cultural thing, not a basic human thing. There have been many cultures where conspicuous consumption has not been a thing.

I assume it’s satire.

27% of their customers work at OpenAI? Other than a very small number of people directly involved, a handful of Reddit mods and Twitterati with a parasocial obsession with the company specifically, and people who can only sleep when they ask ChatGPT if it's time for bed, who's really going to be losing actual sleep over this?

Every single person working at OpenAI is going to have disturbed sleep right now, they're uncertain if their job or the projects they're currently working on are safe. Every recruiter in SV is probably losing sleep trying to poach people, getting anyone from OpenAI is striking oil but right now even high level employees who would normally never leave are in flux. There are a lot of startups in SV, including a huge number of startups based on OpenAI's APIs. If you're working for a startup based on the OpenAI API while this is happening you are working long nights to try and find alternatives and figure out whether you have a product tomorrow morning.

This is a huge event like the suddenly bankruptcy of a large company, it's 778 people in flux. Their families won't be sleeping well.

Minor nitpick.

The author says the company doesn’t know where you live, just where they shipped the blanket.

Presumably though the data is getting to them somehow, either through an app or your wireless network and because of this, they likely do have a way to track users by location.

IP Geolocation is good enough to get to the city level ("uptick in SF sleeplessness").

> The company notes that “data about your sleep activity is transferred from your Device to our servers” every time the Pod’s app syncs with the Pod. Certain features on the device also require location data “including GPS signals, device sensors, Wi-Fi access points, and cell tower IDs.”

Oh, they know where you live.

How soon before Google buys them?

Lol

I will never understand why people care or pretend to care about this. "Oh no, someone queried my sleep data to report aggregated metrics! How horrible." Even the more "invasive" forms of this stuff seem completely untroubling to me. If I sleep too little I'll start seeing ads for melatonin or warm milk or something? Good, I want to see offers that are tailored to what I actually experience. How is this supposed to be bad?

There is a duality between observation and control. The more precisely you can measure and predict a system, then the easier it gets to drive the system to whatever state you'd like.

Desiring privacy and resisting control are reasonable things people who enjoy their freedom and autonomy would want to do.

"Getting poor sleep I see. Sounds like this person is higher risk than the average population. After review it seems we should increase all insurance plans by 20%"

I guess that is mostly only applicable in the US with our for profit healthcare system though.

It's applicable in the US in the sense that it's illegal to do.

Insurance companies have no issue adjusting car insurance rates based on the "safe driving monitor" that they provide you put in your car. Even if you drive safe they adjust by mileage. Not sure how this is any different...just another line in the TOS.

It isn't just health insurance you need to think about.

Illegally applicable. The best kind of applicable.

It's illegal only if you have the means to bring a lawsuit forward and reasonably prove this is happening, which is difficult without a full third-party audit of the codebase of the company.

Imagine the data showing you only went to bed at 2am being used to argue a car accident was your fault, when it wasn’t.

There are plenty of ways your data can be used against you and used to make incorrect assumptions about you.

Ah, so the danger of this technology comes from imagining unrelated bad things happening to people. What if your phone activity revealed that you were awake at 2 am and then courts incorrectly blamed you for an accident? Well, the bad part is courts incorrectly blaming you for an accident, same as with the sleep data.

I personally think it is more important to remember that this info is not necessarily limited to "only courts". Typically, this info is available to anyone with the right amount of cash. Not that I think my sleep data is interesting or valuable...someone seems to think it is...and that should be concerning.

Yes, which is why I also don't want my phone data to be hoovered up by data brokers and appearing in evidence exhibits.

There is a lot of literature in this area of philosophy. This is the famous "You have nothing to hide if you do nothing wrong" which has been proven 1000 times to be a fallacy.

I think the danger in both scenarios is the fact that this data is available for abuse in the first place. It doesn't have to be. You're opening yourself up to the potential that unrelated bad things might happen in return for personalized ads.

Note, this isn't illegal or (in my opinion) even unethical, it just makes me and many others uncomfortable. If that's a tradeoff happy with, then more power to ya!

It's totally fair if you aren't bothered by it. It's also totally fair that others are.

Who do you want to live your life? Is it really your life if all your choices are being taken from you and other entities pretend to know your needs better than you?

This is about autonomy and protecting civil liberties. Surveillance should be viewed through the lens of "would this be okay if a person was in place of the machine?"

I do not want someone watching my sleep so they can tell all their friends.

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