The company says it goes to great lengths to protect its customers’ data.
“To be clear, Sleep Number does not share any Sleep IQ or biometric” data outside the company, Sleep Number spokeswoman Julie Elepano said in an email exchange.
Still, that differs from the company’s privacy notice, which clearly states that personal information — potentially including biometric data — “may” be shared with marketing companies or business partners. They, in turn, could send out pitches for Sleep Number or offers to participate in partner product loyalty programs. The policy also says personal information could be given to partners for “research, analysis or administering surveys.”
Finally, the privacy policy says Sleep Number can “exploit, share and use for any purpose” personal information with names or addresses withheld or stripped out, known as “de-identified” data.
When asked about the seeming difference between what the privacy policy states and her comments, Elepano did not address that directly, but reiterated that the company does not share even de-identified biometric data.
Details From Dreamland
Starting with when you turn in and when you wake up — and many things in between — these beds know a lot.
And because it’s a bed, there’s an inescapable salaciousness factor.
“I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be possible to look at that data and say, ‘Oh, that looks like sex,’” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, talking about the whole range of sleep-tracking tools. “The raw data may not tell you that, but what they do is take the raw data and try to interpret it.”
Smart beds and other types of sleep trackers have different sensors. Sleep Number beds have movement sensors, for instance, which can inflate, deflate or otherwise adjust the mattress for comfort.
Some sleep apps and devices made by other firms even use microphones to track snoring.
Late last year, there was a collective social media freakout when bloggers noticed a quirk in the Sleep Number bed privacy policy that seemed to indicate those beds had a microphone.
But they don’t, the company was quick to note.
Instead, Sleep Number beds gather data through tiny changes in the mattress’s air pressure, said Pete Bils, Sleep Number’s vice president of sleep science and research.
That data — along with goals each consumer sets for sleep — go into creating what the firm calls a Sleep IQ Score, a term devised to assess how well a consumer slept and is used heavily in the company’s marketing. Over time, the score can show if a person is deviating from their averages.
If consumers don’t want to track what’s going on in bed, they can flip on a “privacy mode” setting, which halts transmission but also limits what a consumer can learn about their sleep patterns, which is presumably one reason they bought the bed in the first place.
“The more you use the bed, the more it knows you,” said Bils.
From what is spelled out in privacy policies for these beds and apps, it’s clear the data could be useful in other ways, too.
For example, the French company Withings, which makes the Sleep under-mattress monitor that can track movement, heart rate, snoring and other factors, said it shares anonymous and aggregated data “with partners such as hospitals, researchers or companies, as well as to the public in blog posts and data studies.”
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