Bose sued for spying on their users and selling private data
Who’s the Bose?
Who would have thought that the ears that enable you to hear are collecting your private listening data and selling it to marketing companies? I don’t think anyone saw it coming, but alas we are in the age of information theft.
We all know how valuable data is, the modern gold. Marketing companies pay big money to receive data of customer trends and habits. You can build a profile about anyone and bombard them with the correct ads.
Enter the Bose Connect app.
“Oh joy, an app that connects my smartphone to my headphones or speakers wirelessly.” It sounds like a great idea, I mean wires are always tangling and getting in the way. So here we have the Bose Connect app.
Bose customer Kyle Zak filed a lawsuit in Boston last week claiming the company allegedly designed Bose Connect with the goal of collecting private data from its users. This data includes song titles as well as any audio files (podcasts, etc) you listen to.
He claims that they then create a data profile of each customer’s listening history and habits which they can sell off to data mining companies who in turn send it anywhere they can to make a profit from. You might be thinking that selling off one’s listening history isn’t so bad but you have to look beyond the song.
What you listen to shows a lot about who you are as a person including your religious, political and sexual views as well as your emotional and mental state.
This might not seem like a big deal on the surface but it represents an ever-growing trend of companies stealing our private thoughts/feelings/being and selling it off without our consent so that they in turn can sell us more things.
Woe is Bose.
Source
