My question is: why do an Oral-B app and a Colgate app even exist?
Say I have an app with 1M downloads. Who do I sell 1M email addresses and the fact they've bought a toothbrush to?
Think about how many companies have pivoted to burning cash on adding "AI" to their products. How many of those cases are going to end up actually being a good business decision? Probably very few. It's likely the same with everyone just wanting "data" to "analyze"--even if they have no idea how it might be useful.
tl;dr IDK but they don't do it without a profit motive.
And yeah, the usual electric toothbrushes are terrible slow since the brush heads are in the size of one teeth, instead of 3-4.
Step 1: collect data
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
Hopefully you sell the company between Step 1 and 2.
Competitive brushing!
Hey, now oral b know where you are all the time, who you know etc
"We noticed that brushing takes you X seconds longer than usual. Do you want to buy new bristles for your tooth brush?"
"We noticed you haven't used our tooth brush in a while. Do you want to buy our new tooth brush?"
"We noticed that you started brushing your teeth earlier than usual. This probably means that you started a new job and can afford our new deluxe premium tooth brush."
"We noticed that you brush your teeth later than usual. That probably means that you met with someone who you can recommend our amazing tooth brush to."
"We noticed that your tooth brushing times are all over the place, so you probably had a child. Buy our new baby tooth brush."
And that is just from the time you brush your teeth. However, the app also collections "Health and fitness and Device or other IDs" according to the app description:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pg.oralb.o...
That means that Oral B can link that data with the data harvested from other apps or data brokers, so they probably know everything about you. Health data seems especially creepy to me. I wonder if it is possible to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement from the heart rate data. At least they can definitely tell if you brush longer after seeing their latest Oral B add on TV/YouTube/some website.
* Collect data on brushing frequency and thoroughness, and sell that data to dental insurance companies. Perhaps not even anonymized, so they can raise your premiums if you don't brush as often or as well as they'd like.
* Nag you to buy brush replacements after a certain amount of time or certain number of uses.
* Use dark patterns to trick you into giving access to other, unrelated data on your phone, and sell this data to third parties.
* Market their other products to you, or even perhaps suggest other things (sold by marketing partners) to buy, like different kinds of toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, etc.
Shit's already fucking happening with car insurance. Install their app to reduce your premium! It's only a matter of time before it's the other way around.
sell that data to dental insurance companies
They've pivoted away from that to general benefits management (basically every flavor of job-connected insurance that isn't major medical), FWIW...
You get permissions to whatever you ask for. The unsavvy user will click yes.
You get a push notification channel that can interrupt the user ANY time of day or night and get their immediate attention. Suggesting products and "deals".
Use your imagination. Think like an asshole.
But honestly I'd say that it's probably more about them being able to market their own products to you by displaying ads and sending you push notifications on new deals on brushes, rather than selling your data to third parties.
That's just an example guess, but the bloat is there for a purpose... I'm pretty sure the app gets updated on intervals too, just like so many others under the guise of "security or functional updates".
We're in an era where data is weaponized for profit maximization... The most simple and seemingly benign data sets when combined strategically can work against consumers deeply.
We need app audit boards now, maybe even on a government level, and specific detail of everything apps do to be displayed in app stores. There should be serious consequences if apps are found to do things that are not detailed in their release/update descriptions. This collected data can persist forever, and be used in some of the most destructive ways.
Device/OS makers also need to do better at preventing/partitioning non-essential apps from collecting data they don't need access to...
Likely reasons why this isn't already in place is because most don't know how it happens, and many others are invested in these companies, so they turn a blind eye on regulation of them.
1. I highly doubt that's done on device
2. how are they supposed to link you to your bank account? AFAIK cross app tracking is opt in, at least on iOS so unless the user explicitly opts in, you're not going to get a cross-app identifier.
I think you're overestimating the competence of the shops that develop those apps. I bet that 90% of the code is just company's standard set of frameworks and advertising SDKs they put in every app without even thinking about it.
Personally I just used it once and ended up removing it, but I can see some people using it to ensure their brushing is efficient.
Anyway, it's completely optional, you can just use the brush ignoring the existence of the app.
I’m not tracking my meals. I did use MyFitnessPal for a bit but I didn’t find it useful.
What if you (for whatever reason, doesn't matter) only ate on the left side of your mouth for dinner? You'd spend plenty of time on the left side, but the app might tell you you've done a bad job on the right. Further, depending on what you ate, it might take longer than whatever their predetermined time is to clean the side that had a disproportionate amount of food on it.
What if you have had a tough time with a couple of "problem teeth" that need a bit more love? Is the app capable of tracking where those "problem teeth" are and ensuring that you're spending extra attention there?
I dunno... to me, it seems like it's a no brainer to me when my teeth are clean - I can feel it. Unless a toothbrush has some detailed sensors in the head, I'm gonna seriously doubt its ability to tell me when my teeth are actually clean.
Then I envy you, because the only thing I feel that's different before and after brushing is a generalized "my mouth is sticky on the inside" feeling. I definitely lose track of how much time I spent cleaning each side relatively, and I'm sure there are areas I rarely reach because I don't know the brush isn't touching them.
I'd love having a toothbrush that would monitor if I reach every spot as a baseline; I can handle my problem teeth or any eating side imbalance on my own, especially that there is no rule saying you need to brush exactly 2 minutes (or 2.5 or whatever) and not a second more - I could do my baseline and spend extra 30 seconds or so in the problem areas.
Right before I sleep I also do 4-7-8 interval breathing in bed that slows down my heart rate and gets me calm and sleepy. I use a simple app called iBreathe for that. This breathing session also lets my Apple Watch give me an accurate reading for my heart rate variability (HRV) that gamifies this for me.
(I imagine a system like this would need at least two accelerometers - one close to the tip, and another one in the grip area; the second one would be used to cancel out the movement of users' head and body, allowing the first one to effectively operate in a mouth-relative coordinate system.)
Maybe not from brushing one tooth but brushing the whole mouth you'd get a pretty good picture I'd say. The app would justify itself if it did give you a rough map of how you brushed your teeth and suggest areas that you're missing/if it's being done incorrectly.
How does it even have a census of your teeth?
Some people have wisdom teeth, while other people don't.
Some people have been on the losing end of a bar fight with carneys, and some people haven't.
Also I doubt it’s AI, just doing something fairly basic with the accelerometer data
[1] https://www.vox.com/23901293/dentist-delta-dental-insurance-...
But it's fine; we call it insurance anyway, and everyone knows what it means, so there's no problem.
“When you look at the dental insurance model, it doesn’t protect the patient from financial risk. It’s the opposite,” said Marko Vujicic, chief economist and vice president of the Health Policy Institute at the American Dental Association. “Once the benefit runs out, the $1,400 or whatever it is, all of that financial burden is on the patient. So it protects the insurer, they’re limited on their exposure.”
In other words, there is no real benefit to offering a "good brusher" discounts.
/rant
Perhaps the answer is to put the toothbrush in a different room!
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Conclusion
Using the same brushing force and a highly abrasive toothpaste, manual toothbrushes are significantly less abrasive compared to power toothbrushes for an 8.5—year simulation.
So when you're using an electric toothbrush, you don't need to brush as long, or as firmly. It doesn't help that many people tend to brush with way too much force anyway.
But in general if you spend 2-3 minutes brushing with a conventional toothbrush, that's going to be good enough if you're also seeing a dentist regularly to remove tartar and check for cavities.
The problem most people have with a regular toothbrush is they brush like a madman for 20-30 seconds and that's just not enough. That's another advantage of the electric brushes, they run on a timed cycle which is a lot longer than most people would brush on their own.
It's like many tools we use: sure, doing it the old-fashioned way will work well enough if you do it properly, but the new tool makes it easier and more foolproof (and maybe faster), in exchange for higher cost. This doesn't make the new tool bad.
What happens with the data that is collected is NOYB (none of your business).
I wasn't born with an innate ability to know how to brush my teeth or how to shave (my electric razor also has an app), I had to learn how. If the devices I use can tell that I'm using them wrong, and there's a better way to do things, it's nice to have it tell me.
To my knowledge it does not know where you are in your mouth when brushing (positioning via accelerometer/gyroscope), so a synchronized start would likely give similar results.
I don't care for an app-connected toothbrush personally. But suggesting that just because it can't keep track of your diet overall means it can't possibly give any insights in health is overly reductive. A workout tracker app can't keep track of your food intake, but that doesn't mean it can't help the user be healthier.
Apart from the I go to the dentist 2-3 times a year, they do a great job telling me what area of my mouth I need to focus on. A toothbrush wouldn't really be able to give me that info anyway.
I decided when I bought it that I would never ever ever install that app or make use of these features (it's tooth-brushing, for crying out loud), and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
I'm sure the company just wants to collect data about my brushing habits in order to sell it to... someone, who knows.
(Something is up with the world when you're thinking about toothbrushes that respect your privacy. It's like something out of a Douglas Adams book.)
It wasn't worth it to me to spend more time on it to see if I could find something without the connected crap.
(And I do wonder if the connected crap makes the device cheaper, since they're hoping to make money on selling user data.)
I'd buy a toothbrush that did that, even if it had "AI" in it's name.
But no, I think it just logs the brush duration and for the more expensive models the "coverage", or something like that.
- Brushing pressure
- How long you brush
- When you brush
- Where you brush (tracking orientation and motion)
With that, you might see some trend of "you brush your left-back-bottom teeth a little harder than the rest, and you're not quite getting your front middle teeth very well".
Now, if that data is actually useful logged and analyzed is another question.
I've got a toothbrush that theoretically has bluetooth connectivity support. I've never used it. But I do like there's a colorful ring that lights up to show the brushing pressure and I do like the 30 second timer feature to help ensure I brush each area of my mouth about the same amount of time. Neither require bluetooth and an app though.
People want to log and track your health data.