I'd always thought that it was about any other data they can slurp from your phone. Presumably knowing your hygiene habits is valuable when correlated with your facebook activty. Just having a list of people that overspend on this type of tech and have the app installed is probably valuable.

tl;dr IDK but they don't do it without a profit motive.

Like if the average user uses it for 15 seconds, it might signal them that the existing brushes need to be wider/longer/arced, so users can clean their teeth efficiently in that timeframe.

And yeah, the usual electric toothbrushes are terrible slow since the brush heads are in the size of one teeth, instead of 3-4.

You know the underpants gnomes, it's like that:

Step 1: collect data

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit

Hopefully you sell the company between Step 1 and 2.

Well, say the app requests access to your contacts... so you can link up with friends! Or your files... so it can save your data locally! Or your location... well i don't know. The app doesn't only check your bruhing habits, it's 300mb! At any point it could be updated to do any amount of spying and you'll never be able to tell

What permissions does the app ask for? Most likely location for some bullshit Bluetooth feature, and no doubt they request other permissions like contacts and media so you can share with friends that you clean your teeth.

Hey, now oral b know where you are all the time, who you know etc

> What they know is how long the toothbrush is on. How are they going to monetize that data?

"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.

Sell it to dental insurance companies who charge different amounts depending on how frequently you brush your teeth and for how long?

I can think of a few things at least:

* 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.

"Here's a list of consumers who were gullible enough to install our app!"

They want you to buy new head and they will annoy, I mean notify you, until you do so via the app.

Having an app on someone's phone is a huge attention and data opportunity.

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.

China pays big bucks for the data so they know exactly when everyone is brushing their teeth and know exactly what time to attack.

The app probably makes you enter personal information like age and location, which is already very valuable.

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 sort of data can be extremely useful to pattern someone. Most people brush their teeth either in the morning, or before bedtime (or both ideally.) So just knowing _when_ they're brushing their teeth you can determine their sleep pattern, and thus match that up somewhat to a timezone. On it's own this isn't incredibly useful, but combined with some other data it becomes a lot more useful to identify someone.

To be fair, all of that tracking and data collection would still never add up to some 100MB. It's more likely that they have extremely unoptimized assets (images, icons, fonts, time zone data, sounds, etc) and/or are using one of these janky "frameworks" that let you slap together a half-baked "native" app in a few hours by translating your poorly-written JavaScript into poorly-written native code.

>The extra code might there to determine your spending habits across other apps and your bank balance and then to determine where you're located so that it can provide information on regional affluence so they can price toothpaste & brushes higher in strategic regions...

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.

Or maybe it's because every other company has an app, just like every company had a hotline at some point. Even if few people will use it, you have to have all the communication channels covered.

I suggest reading the posted link, it's quite informative and saves you from having to make assumptions.

> The extra code might there to determine your spending habits across other apps and your bank balance and then to determine where you're located so that it can provide information on regional affluence so they can price toothpaste & brushes higher in strategic regions...

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.

To who?

Say I have an app with 1M downloads. Who do I sell 1M email addresses and the fact they've bought a toothbrush to?