Re: Personal fitness and menstruation history - Is that shocking? They're earbuds, but they're marketed as fitness buds that track personal data. It looks like Fitbit for your ears. Fitbit and Apple Health (or whatever it is called) does these kinds of things as well.
Re: Bose collecting all that stuff
I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music and environments for which they are used. That should, of course, be opt-in, but I don't think it is evil.
Do I necessarily like the latter example? No. I believe, like the "cookie policies" that exist on many websites, there should be "Needed permissions" and "Please thank you" permissions, and they should incentivize the consumer to help them out. Amazon does this on their Kindles: $20 off if you let them run ads on the lock screen.
But if all the manufacturers do this, then what competition is there to push them to change?
Ordinarily when you pay $350 for headphones it is assumed that the vendor has already invested money in doing R&D to make them work properly and isn't planning to do testing on you without telling you or compensating you for it, to enable the functionality you already paid for.
I bought headphones, I did not sign up for a research project.
We went from paying for software to getting it for free in return for our data and now we're apparently giving over our data even for physical devices that we pay top dollar for.
> ow we're apparently giving over our data even for physical devices that we pay top dollar for.
This is the thing that really bugs me. I don't like the user is the product aspect but I can at least understand it in a free setting. In a high case luxury setting where you aren't even getting a discount? That's just absurd. All they've done is increase their bottom end, give you no choice and no discount.
I see this as only another example of how markets with too little, or the wrong kind of regulation so easily creates anti consumer, or anti environment, etc behavior.
... Which makes total sense from a market efficiency point of view, at least as long consumers doesn't have perfect information and the time to stay informed about almost everything. Which isn't true, and people won't be, especially since the most basic decision theory that we can derive from our behavior would go almost entirely counter this.
... Which isn't strange at all as the number of new or changing facts that could affect our living situation probably didn't change as much from 150000 years ago, as changed last week alone.
Sometimes I think one of, or maybe the most damaging lie of our century is that we are generally capable of individual, rational thought for everyday decisions. We really are not, not to any significant fraction.
Almost all our decision are derived from observation of very few instances, judging based on survival instincts, and social cost/benefits.
In contrast much of rules regarding eg advertising and much of economic theory seems predicates that everyone has the time and energy to figure out which toothpaste company also are not totally exploiting some workers in some country five shell companies and thousands of miles away. But I digress.
> I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music and environments for which they are used.
I can't see why they would need so many samples. Wouldn't using the data from (say) 100 Bose employees be sufficient to cover most noisy environments these buds are used in?
If you're trying for perfection, then not even remotely, no. The type of data provided by "one million users" will uncover issues that "one hundred users" simply never can.
I believe it was iOS 10 or 11 developer betas that would, on each beta update, run a trial APFS conversion process against the phone's internal filesystem, check the result for consistency, and then discard the replica and report success/failure w/ logs — so that Apple could find the issues that they couldn't find at 'one hundred users' scale.
There's a famous Bose bughunt article that proves this not to be the case. I can't find where they posted it on a blog or something but here's the forum link:
Ah yes, company speak for "collecting massive amounts of personal data for our profits and your detriment." It's clear now with the fitbit reference that this is mainly a spying device.
Re: Bose collecting all that stuff
I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music and environments for which they are used. That should, of course, be opt-in, but I don't think it is evil.
Do I necessarily like the latter example? No. I believe, like the "cookie policies" that exist on many websites, there should be "Needed permissions" and "Please thank you" permissions, and they should incentivize the consumer to help them out. Amazon does this on their Kindles: $20 off if you let them run ads on the lock screen.
But if all the manufacturers do this, then what competition is there to push them to change?