It used to be that vibrators betrayed your privacy by going off as you were going through airport security. Now their ability to betray your privacy is at a whole other level. Some can send private information across the Internet. This has led to some major lawsuits.
Should we no longer trust our vibrators? Are these loyal friends who are there to cheer us up when we are down and get us off when we are alone no longer to be trusted? Are we facing a crises of trust? We’ll look at the actual issues and explore whether this is hype or if our vibrators actually are turning on us rather than just vibrating.
It started last year with Canadian company We-Vibe. They made the We-Vibe Classic and Rave, vibrators that connected via Bluetooth to your smartphone. One person could use the app on their phone to control the vibrator. It seems like just good clean fun, but the company was also harvesting data about how customers were using the vibrators. The company logged how often the toys were used and the temperature and intensity settings.
There was no breach of the data to outside sources, but it was shown that the data could be intercepted and decoded by a third party, and that it was linked to an email address. This led to a class action suit led by two anonymous purchasers. The end result was a $3.75 million judgment against the company with individual payouts as high as $10,000. Even if you did not use the app, you could still qualify for up to $199.
Gathering usage data about a customer is no big deal for most things, but is not acceptable for sex toys that allow that data to be linked to a specific email address. This is why there was such a big payout. True, no one was actually harmed by this, but they could have been. After getting smacked down this hard, I can not see other companies making this same mistake. Many of them would have simply been put out of business by a judgment that large.
I believe that many customers would have been upset by the collection of data at all, but it is a normal business practice and helps businesses improve their products. It should never be linked to personally identifying information, however. They also need to have a very clear privacy policy explaining how the information will be used and protected.
This past week it was Lovense in the privacy fail spotlight. We are again dealing with a smartphone app to control a vibrator, but with a very different and more concerning privacy problem. A software fix was all that was needed to resolve this, and the app already has been fixed, with a note on the download page for the App that the November 13th update had “minor bugs fixed.” Way to be upfront and honest with customers, Lovense!
Here is the problem. The user gives the app access to the microphone and camera, which allows them to use the in-app chat function and to send voice clips. What was discovered is that the phone had a six minute audio recording of the couple having sex.
According to the company, this was actually just a cache file that should have been deleted but was not. It was never transmitted anywhere. Unless someone hacked your phone (and God knows what else they would find there), the data was reasonably safe. While I believe there was negligence on We-Vibe’s part by linking private data with an email identifier, in this case it does sound like just a stupid bug. The company was not using the data, nor was it easily accessible by anyone but the phone’s owner.
The reason the app recorded audio at all is because it listens to sounds and uses them to control the vibrator. It is fairly normal app behavior to store a cache on the drive which is then deleted.
These are the two big privacy stories dealing with connected sex toys, but let’s back up a little to see what they mean. In neither case was anyone’s privacy violated, although the potential for that did exist. We-Vibe paid a very heavy price for their mistake. I think the problem with Lovense was less serious and quickly fixed.
The real problem, though, is not with the vibrator companies, or with any of the companies that make Internet connected devices. The problem is that we still do not have a legal framework of laws to protect people’s privacy in general. As one privacy expert noted, “It’s a Wild West right now.”
For now, though, despite the dire warnings in the many articles on these two cases I saw, the chances of a harmful privacy violation from using an Internet connected sex toy is still pretty slim. You have far more worries about those pictures on your phone.
For better or worse, we now live in a world where “over-sharing”is the norm. We even made a little fun of this in our April 1st parody review for the FollowMe !Vibe. People want to be connected, and they should be able to share the types of information they want. As with all issues about sex, we strongly believe in the importance of consent, and nothing should be stored without a person’s explicit permission. While I think this is rare in the adult toy marketplace, it is a problem in general, and we need better laws giving companies better guidance as to what is acceptable.