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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

I haven't tried Sonos, but if a product, which you'd assume is more or less just a speaker, requires you to "sign up" or to some extend expects you to manage it via a smart phone, you should generally be sceptical.

What annoys me is that Sonos shouldn't even need to do this crap. The people I know who own Sonos products love them and already pay a premium for the product. How much can they honestly be making of this data?

We know from a few years back, that the experts in violating your privacy, Facebook, will make around $60 per year, for an American, somewhat less for Europeans and nothing from everyone else. I doubt that Sonos is able to make ANY meaningful profit from the data they collect, so why bother?

It's the same with Samsung, how much does it cost to develop and maintain the infrastructure for collecting data, compared to how much money is to be made?

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>I haven't tried Sonos, but if a product, which you'd assume is more or less just a speaker, requires you to "sign up" or to some extend expects you to manage it via a smart phone, you should generally be sceptical.

It's worse than that. Not only do you need to have an account to use these speakers, but there's no way to run them without using the built in app, and there's no way to avoid getting on the upgrade treadmill with the app.

I had a sonos setup I was very happy with, until I was forced to upgrade my laptop app because it wouldn't let me play any music without upgrading. And then guess what? My laptop was too old (circa 2010 17" macbook pro) for tne new app, and when I complained on their forums, was told to upgrade my laptop because the os was no longer supported and it was a "security risk to run old operating systems".

Goodwill was very happy to receive those speakers that week, and sonos is now on my list of companies I will never buy from, and on the list of companies I will take time out of my day to make sure my friends (irl and internet strangers) hear about their practices.

Sonos speakers are DLNA sinks. Once they are set up you can stream music using something like https://github.com/masmu/pulseaudio-dlna, without using the Sonos app on your phone or computer.

What would be really cool (to me) is if the speakers were exposed as Bluetooth audio devices. I don't want to have to think about how to setup DLNA or what's compatible with it.

DLNA and external speakers are 2 very different things. Suffice it to say you should choose and buy the kind of device you want.

I used the Sonos app to set my speakers up once. Since then I just use whatever device (usually phone or TV) is nearby to control them via spotify. Works excellently.

I hate them for the same reason.

They also had dedicated controllers which were deprecated, but a phone app isn't as versatile. You can't lend your phone to a guest at your house, or to a kid, etc.

> How much can they honestly be making of this data?

There's no actual evidence that they make any money from this data, how did you come to this conclusion? This article is a very opinionated translation of a privacy policy that tells the narrative the writer wants to tell and assumes bad faith from the get-go. It's a very big stretch to go from "I don't think it fits with legitimate interest" to "Sonos is 100% selling my data".

Sorry, where is the evidence Sonos is selling any of this data?

It's recurring revenue, while they only sell a speaker once.

Anyway, I don't understand why governments don't ban user tracking or targeted ads.

Ah, I've been thinking about this, what we need to ban is this:

* The creation of products or services derived from the collection of users private information.

I don't expect Garmin to not track their users, that's basically the feature we bought when we buy their watches. Sonos/Samsung/Facebook/Google, who-ever, should be allowed to collect data on their users, BUT they should NOT be allowed to turn that data into a product that is resold to third parties.

For most companies that would mean the end of data collection, while not preventing those companies who use the data for creating meaningful services to do so.

Yes, data brokers should not be allowed to exist [1].

But I also think that any collection of data for advertising purposes (e.g. by Google) is unjustified, simply because if the user is looking for a product they can enter the data that they think is relevant in a search (which is immediately forgotten), and this could provide similar accuracy to following the user without the downsides. (In case of such a "product search", Google could extend the search procedure by adding some questions and/or checkboxes, as long as they forget the data immediately.)

[1] https://clearcode.cc/blog/what-is-data-broker/

Wouldn’t that merely create an incentive to work around the “no third party” rule by doing everything in-house? Like Google, for instance.

Googles ad department wouldn’t be able to sell targetted ads, because that based of their collected data.

Why not? Google doesn’t sell or make available the collected data. It just uses it to make a better targeted ad system, which Google then does sell.

But that was my point, that is what I want to ban. Service derived from private data collected from other products.

If you ban that, you’ll soon have a very hard time proving that Google has good ads because of data collection.

>governments don't ban user tracking

You mean like governments whose "authorities" salivate when someone has a "smart device" (aka something in your house with a camera and/or speaker) that records every word you say 24/7? The same government/authorities that solve crimes based on your fitbit tracker tracking your heartrate? (It was in the news a couple of years ago - also discussed in HN)

Most "eyes" governments do their best to increase tracking, reduce encryption, reduce the cost of policing (and information collection and processing).

Some people in a government perhaps, but certainly not all people in a government.

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