Originally published at: Smart mattress company puts user data to good use: online tittle-tattle | Boing Boing
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They enshittified the bed.
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Just not in the way one would expect…
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“According to the bed’s analytics there was a person with you for 0.75 hours who is 3.5 pounds lighter than your spouse. Please deposit $200 to erase the record.”
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I can only assume that this guy has been itching for an excuse to emulate Uber’s “rides of glory” incident.
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The tell-tale sign? You requested a ride between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday – then got picked up from your drop-off point just a few hours later.
… I think that’s called “clubbing” 
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Ha ha! Eww, but ha ha!
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On the one hand, I don’t for a minute think that there was a 27% increase in people getting under 5 hours of sleep because of the OpenAI drama - the number of people giving a shit about that is so ridiculously minuscule. However, I could believe that the target audience for “smart mattresses” has heavy overlap with people who do give a shit about the OpenAI drama - thus making their data utterly useless because the average user is some AI/tech bro so completely non-representative of the average sleeper. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if, even within that narrow context, their data was still shit.)
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Bummer, I was hoping they were going to release stats about the sexual habits of their customers.
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A mattress with electronics it in? Networked?
WTF?!?!?!?!
Why the fuck does a mattress need to be ‘smart’?
We’re doomed.
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I’m sure it is marketed as disrupting the billion dollar sleep industry, too. Which isn’t as good a selling point on second glance.
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There are some houses where just opening the door or turning on the lights requires an internet connection to a cloud server.
And thereby you can tell the difference between someone who understands technology, and someone who fetishises it.
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The product does do temperature control; so it starts out from a more or less reasonable premise and then adds the delicious dose of user surveillance, dubious ‘app’, studiously FDA-unapproved health claims; and quantified gamified self stuff that VCs just can’t get enough of.
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Funnily enough, I’ve never needed my mattress to need a connection for me to be able to lay down on it and sleep. 
So does an electric underblanket - and it has a real analogue switchgear which entails me using my fingers to operate it, probably more effectively than using them on an app. Sigh.
Am I old-fashioned? I hope so!
i’m going to go and sleep on mine now, and will warm it up with the electric blanket while I clean my teeth and have a wash. G’night, all.
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I am increasingly perplexed that GDPR-for-the-United-States isn’t the leading “regulate AI” talking point. Or do we prefer to talk about fictional singularity scenarios?
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Don’t forget the “smart toilet.” Why the hell does anyone need a “smart” toilet? So you can flush it while you’re out nightclubbing? So you can check if your kid did a Number One or a Number Two? And, yes, I’ve seen ads for a “smart toothbrush” as well.
A friend bought a Never-Heard-of-It brand wrist fitness monitor that connects to some server God knows where. China, I suppose. It got me thinking about where all this data goes. Not just to the big data companies, but to an infinity of mattress makers, crappy toy manufacturers, toilet makers, lawn sprinkler sellers, on and on and on, spread throughout the world. Kind of makes us one big family, doesn’t it?
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When you mention smart toilets I can’t help but to share The SmartPipe ™!
Watch and laugh:
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I could believe it too, but I could also believe that it’s a case of looking at noise hoping for a pattern; sometimes one appears without meaning.
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I’m a little more permissive about privacy, but a mattress pad company reporting on their customers’ sleeping habits is stalker-level creepy.
I don’t even care if it’s aggregated/depersonalized. A mattress pad company should not be reporting this even if they had some valid reason for collecting the data.
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It doesn’t just warm a bed, it can also cool it and you can even control which side of the bed gets a particular temperature. I’ve looked into their product before and it looks pretty good, me and my SO are usually overly warm and their temp control would be great except it’s insanely expensive and requires a subscription. It is possible to not use the subscription and never connect it online but you lose most of the functionality of it, which i might almost be inclined to use just for basic temp control but again… the price is crazy high.
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