Your bed could be watching you.
This story also ran on Time. This story can be republished for free (details).
OK, so not with a camera.
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But if you have any of a variety of “smart beds,” mattress pads or sleep apps, it knows when you go to sleep. It knows when you toss and turn. It may even be able to tell when you’re having sex.
Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers.
“This gives us the intelligence to be able to continue to feed our algorithms,” CEO Shelly Ibach told attendees at a Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego last month.
Analyzing all that personal data, Ibach continued, not only helps consumers learn more about their health, but also aids the company’s efforts to make a better product.
Still, consumer privacy advocates are increasingly raising concerns about the fate of personal health information — which is potentially valuable to companies that collect and sell it — gathered through a growing number of internet-connected devices.
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“We don’t know what happens to all that data,” said Burcu Kilic, director of the digital rights program at Public Citizen, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
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The information “is also relevant and important to pharmaceutical companies and those that make hospital-related technology,” Kilic said.
Nonetheless, consumers are flocking to mattresses and under-mattress sensors aimed at quantifying sleep as well as sleep-tracking devices; sleep apps are among the most popular downloads on Apple and Android smartphones.
The Sleep Number bed is one of the most heavily marketed of such products, with press releases and ads often equating good sleep with a better life. Sales of the beds grew 6% from 2017 to $1.5 billion in 2018, company filings show. Early this year, the company signed a partnership with Ariana Huffington’s Thrive Global, a corporate wellness firm she launched after leaving The Huffington Post in 2016. Last year, the bed maker began a multiyear partnership with the NFL, in which the company gives its Sleep Number beds to players.
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. Gta 5 apk for android free download dwgamez.
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.
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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.
Macos sierra installer app. 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. https://lawyerrenew577.weebly.com/djing-app-with-spotify.html.
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.”
No Sleep For Mac
According to the Sleep Number privacy policy, it collects personal information, which can include names and information about a consumer’s age, weight, height and gender. If a consumer creates a user profile on the bed’s app, that personal information is expanded to include specifics about movement, positions, respiration and heart rate.
That is also true for children if parents create a user profile for them.
The policy also notes that personal data might be stored indefinitely, even “after you cancel or deactivate” user accounts.
It’s More Than Just Zzzzz
The privacy policies of many devices that track and transmit personal information allow for the sharing of data that has been stripped of personal identifiers.
But privacy experts have shown it’s not terribly difficult to use or combine such information to “re-identify” people.
“You are left with the impression that, ‘Don’t worry, no one will be able to point to you,’ but they don’t actually say that,” said Tien. “I don’t know how they actually could say that.”
Unlike personal data collected in a doctor’s office or a sleep clinic, the information gathered by sleep trackers is not protected by federal privacy rules.
https://hrfwyw.weebly.com/spotify-free-account-time-limit.html. Some sleep trackers or apps can connect with other “smart” devices in your home, such as a thermostat or coffee maker.
Nifty, for sure, because as you wake up, your heater can kick on and the coffee maker can start doing its thing. But it also can mean those devices are sharing your information. Sleep Number said its beds can import information from other devices but does not share customer information with them.
Still, the interconnectedness exposes more vulnerabilities.
“We connect all these devices to each other,” noted Kilic at Public Citizen. “If hackers want to get into the system, [they] can easily do so and collect all this info from you: How do you use your bed? How often do you have sex? This is very sensitive information.”
Privacy experts recommend encryption and the use of strong passwords and additional authentication whenever possible.
The goal of the data gathering, Sleep Number and other companies say, is helping sleep-deprived Americans do a better job at, well, sleeping.
But do consumers really need an app — or a bed that can cost thousands of dollars — to tell them how rested they feel in the morning?
Such tools are “great because it makes people more aware of sleep, but it’s a slippery slope,” said Dr. Seema Khosla, a pulmonologist and medical director of the North Dakota Center for Sleep, a sleep study facility in Fargo. Khosla, who uses a few trackers herself, is also the lead author of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s position paper on sleep apps.
Izotope rx4 patch download. One unexpected consequence: Consumers so attuned to their data may experience anxiety — and an inability to sleep.
“We call it orthosomnia,” she said. “They get all this data and get upset about having a perfect number. We tell them to put it away for a couple of weeks.”
There’s no doubting that in a lot of people’s opinions, Macbooks are rightly one of the most popular laptops in the world. This is due to a host of reasons – from strong battery life to great user experience to easy personalization.
One thing that Mac’s are well known for being good for is being used for a long period of time. Often, might not not even have the need to turn your Mac off for a week or so (it’s recommended you turn them off weekly, but they will stay on longer than this). Instead, when you’re not using your Mac, you can put it into sleep mode.
Or, you should be able to, at least. Some people have the issue where their Mac won’t sleep, and it won’t go into sleep mode as it should. What can you do to fix this issue? Well, here’s just a few of the ways you can do this.
Sleep Number App For IphoneMac Won’t Sleep
Fortunately, if your Mac is refusing to enter sleep mode, then there are some things that you can do to resolve the problem. If you follow this step by step guide, then you should be able to make your Mac go to sleep.
Check Energy Saver
https://naeadl.weebly.com/blog/clear-caches-app-mac. The first thing that you should do if your Mac isn’t sleeping is to check the energy mode and sleep settings that you’re using with your Mac. In some cases, the problem could be as simply fixed by changing the settings around around.
Firstly, you’re going to need to go ahead and enter into your Macbook’s Energy Saver. You can do this by going to the Apple Icon, then System Preferences, and then into Energy Saver. This is where you can control your Mac’s sleep mode settings.
Now that you’re in Energy Saver, you’ll be able to change things around to suit your own preferences. This includes the amount of time that your Macbook takes before it ends up going into sleep mode.
The most important thing to look at here is located in the Power Adapter tab. You can actually see something here called Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off.
As you can probably guess, if the box for this is ticked, then your Mac is never going to go into sleep mode. So, the first step is unchecking this box if it’s checked, and this will fix your issue.
Below this, you’ll also see the option Wake for Wi-fi network access. You’ll want to uncheck this as well, otherwise other users will wake your Mac up when they’re online trying to use resources shared between the two of you.
Turn your Bluetooth Settings off
The Energy Saver settings are the most likely thing to be causing an issue in your System Preferences, but they aren’t the only thing. After you’ve finished running through the Energy Saver step, you’ll need to go ahead and enter into your Bluetooth settings too.
When you enter your Bluetooth settings, you’ll want to click on Advanced. https://naeadl.weebly.com/blog/best-mac-to-pc-messaging-app. This will bring up another level that you can change things that are more detailed about your Bluetooth.
Does anything stand out here? Yes, that’s right – the bottom option which read Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer can stop your Mac from entering into sleep mode. Although this should only work when you’re using any Bluetooth devices with the Mac, it can sometimes cause you form going into sleep mode even when you’re not using them. So, go ahead and turn this off.
Go through your Sharing Settings
So, we’ve sorted out the Energy Saver and Bluetooth settings, so what’s next? Now, you’ll want to proceed into your Shared settings. You can find this easily in your System Preferences.
Here, you’ll need to go through and see if there’s anything which may be preventing your Mac from entering into sleep mode. It could be any of the options, so you’ll need to do your own thinking here to figure out what could be causing the problem.
Generally, the best thing for you to do in this scenario is to turn off anything that you don’t need. Then, you won’t need to worry about your sharing settings being the source of your issue.
See which apps you’re using
One of the most important things that you’ll want to do if you’re struggling to figure out why your Mac won’t sleep is to see which apps and running. Any processes that are running on your Mac, even if they’re only in the background, could be the reason why your Mac is staying on.
The easiest way for you to open your Activity Monitor is simply by pressing Command + Space. This will bring up the search function, and you can easily look for the monitor and load it up.
Then, when you’re in Activity Monitor, you’ll want to go ahead and enter into the Energy tab at the top. You’ll actually be able to see a column here which reads Preventing Sleep.
Now, you can sort the column by Ascending and you’ll easily be able to see if any of the apps that you’ve got open are preventing your app from going into sleep mode. Often, this will say Chrome, because it’s likely you’ve got a tab open that will stop your Macbook from doing this. So, make sure all of these apps are closed too.
Conclusion
Overall, these are the main ways that your Mac could be preventing itself from entering into sleep mode. Fortunately, the majority of the time there’s something in the settings which is causing this problem.
https://realtytree701.weebly.com/download-and-install-dropbox-for-mac.html. Whether it’s your Bluetooth or sharing settings, or a rogue app that’s causing the issue, you can usually find out what the source is pretty easily. And once you do, finally your Mac will be able to get a rest!
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