Why is the Oral-B iOS app almost 300 MB? And why is Colgate's app even bigger..?

What they know is how long the toothbrush is on. How are they going to monetize that data?

"We noticed that brushing takes you X seconds longer than usual. Do you want to buy new bristles for your tooth brush?"

"We noticed you haven't used our tooth brush in a while. Do you want to buy our new tooth brush?"

"We noticed that you started brushing your teeth earlier than usual. This probably means that you started a new job and can afford our new deluxe premium tooth brush."

"We noticed that you brush your teeth later than usual. That probably means that you met with someone who you can recommend our amazing tooth brush to."

"We noticed that your tooth brushing times are all over the place, so you probably had a child. Buy our new baby tooth brush."

And that is just from the time you brush your teeth. However, the app also collections "Health and fitness and Device or other IDs" according to the app description:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pg.oralb.o...

That means that Oral B can link that data with the data harvested from other apps or data brokers, so they probably know everything about you. Health data seems especially creepy to me. I wonder if it is possible to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement from the heart rate data. At least they can definitely tell if you brush longer after seeing their latest Oral B add on TV/YouTube/some website.

Well, say the app requests access to your contacts... so you can link up with friends! Or your files... so it can save your data locally! Or your location... well i don't know. The app doesn't only check your bruhing habits, it's 300mb! At any point it could be updated to do any amount of spying and you'll never be able to tell

I can think of a few things at least:

* Collect data on brushing frequency and thoroughness, and sell that data to dental insurance companies. Perhaps not even anonymized, so they can raise your premiums if you don't brush as often or as well as they'd like.

* Nag you to buy brush replacements after a certain amount of time or certain number of uses.

* Use dark patterns to trick you into giving access to other, unrelated data on your phone, and sell this data to third parties.

* Market their other products to you, or even perhaps suggest other things (sold by marketing partners) to buy, like different kinds of toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, etc.

What permissions does the app ask for? Most likely location for some bullshit Bluetooth feature, and no doubt they request other permissions like contacts and media so you can share with friends that you clean your teeth.

Hey, now oral b know where you are all the time, who you know etc

Sell it to dental insurance companies who charge different amounts depending on how frequently you brush your teeth and for how long?

You know the underpants gnomes, it's like that:

Step 1: collect data

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit

Hopefully you sell the company between Step 1 and 2.

The app probably makes you enter personal information like age and location, which is already very valuable.

But honestly I'd say that it's probably more about them being able to market their own products to you by displaying ads and sending you push notifications on new deals on brushes, rather than selling your data to third parties.

"Here's a list of consumers who were gullible enough to install our app!"

Having an app on someone's phone is a huge attention and data opportunity.

You get permissions to whatever you ask for. The unsavvy user will click yes.

You get a push notification channel that can interrupt the user ANY time of day or night and get their immediate attention. Suggesting products and "deals".

Use your imagination. Think like an asshole.

Like if the average user uses it for 15 seconds, it might signal them that the existing brushes need to be wider/longer/arced, so users can clean their teeth efficiently in that timeframe.

And yeah, the usual electric toothbrushes are terrible slow since the brush heads are in the size of one teeth, instead of 3-4.

That sort of data can be extremely useful to pattern someone. Most people brush their teeth either in the morning, or before bedtime (or both ideally.) So just knowing _when_ they're brushing their teeth you can determine their sleep pattern, and thus match that up somewhat to a timezone. On it's own this isn't incredibly useful, but combined with some other data it becomes a lot more useful to identify someone.

I'd always thought that it was about any other data they can slurp from your phone. Presumably knowing your hygiene habits is valuable when correlated with your facebook activty. Just having a list of people that overspend on this type of tech and have the app installed is probably valuable.

tl;dr IDK but they don't do it without a profit motive.

They want you to buy new head and they will annoy, I mean notify you, until you do so via the app.

China pays big bucks for the data so they know exactly when everyone is brushing their teeth and know exactly what time to attack.

To be fair, all of that tracking and data collection would still never add up to some 100MB. It's more likely that they have extremely unoptimized assets (images, icons, fonts, time zone data, sounds, etc) and/or are using one of these janky "frameworks" that let you slap together a half-baked "native" app in a few hours by translating your poorly-written JavaScript into poorly-written native code.

Or maybe it's because every other company has an app, just like every company had a hotline at some point. Even if few people will use it, you have to have all the communication channels covered.

I suggest reading the posted link, it's quite informative and saves you from having to make assumptions.

The extra code might there to determine your spending habits across other apps and your bank balance and then to determine where you're located so that it can provide information on regional affluence so they can price toothpaste & brushes higher in strategic regions...

1. I highly doubt that's done on device

2. how are they supposed to link you to your bank account? AFAIK cross app tracking is opt in, at least on iOS so unless the user explicitly opts in, you're not going to get a cross-app identifier.

The extra code might there to determine your spending habits across other apps and your bank balance and then to determine where you're located so that it can provide information on regional affluence so they can price toothpaste & brushes higher in strategic regions...

I think you're overestimating the competence of the shops that develop those apps. I bet that 90% of the code is just company's standard set of frameworks and advertising SDKs they put in every app without even thinking about it.

To who?

Say I have an app with 1M downloads. Who do I sell 1M email addresses and the fact they've bought a toothbrush to?

But "detailed feedback" isn't "accurate feedback". I mean, it's pretty 'neat' that it can tell you which teeth have been 'correctly' cleaned based on the amount of time you spend in a specific spot, but is that an accurate gauge?

What if you (for whatever reason, doesn't matter) only ate on the left side of your mouth for dinner? You'd spend plenty of time on the left side, but the app might tell you you've done a bad job on the right. Further, depending on what you ate, it might take longer than whatever their predetermined time is to clean the side that had a disproportionate amount of food on it.

What if you have had a tough time with a couple of "problem teeth" that need a bit more love? Is the app capable of tracking where those "problem teeth" are and ensuring that you're spending extra attention there?

I dunno... to me, it seems like it's a no brainer to me when my teeth are clean - I can feel it. Unless a toothbrush has some detailed sensors in the head, I'm gonna seriously doubt its ability to tell me when my teeth are actually clean.

If you don’t mind me asking, how do you keep track of eating healthy?

I am really interested, what do you use for waking up early?

Probably an accelerometer.

How does it know which tooth you’re cleaning?

How does it even have a census of your teeth?

Some people have wisdom teeth, while other people don't.

Some people have been on the losing end of a bar fight with carneys, and some people haven't.

Okay, so it is better. How much better is it? I don't use an electric toothbrush, I haven't had a cavity since childhood. Why do I need a better toothbrush? Can the cost be justified?

The toilet belongs in a different room! Used to be called a water closet.

Tracking the temperature and time of cooking is only one part about grilling meats. There's still cutting the meat, ingredients in the rub, applying the rub, the cooldown, the final slicing, and so much more. Why bother having an app-connected remote thermometer if it can't do all of these things?

I don't care for an app-connected toothbrush personally. But suggesting that just because it can't keep track of your diet overall means it can't possibly give any insights in health is overly reductive. A workout tracker app can't keep track of your food intake, but that doesn't mean it can't help the user be healthier.

The idea is to help focus brushing on specific teeth or quadrants, and it uses Bluetooth to know when the brush is on or off. Maybe it signals when you push too hard and the brush pauses for a second as well.

To my knowledge it does not know where you are in your mouth when brushing (positioning via accelerometer/gyroscope), so a synchronized start would likely give similar results.

Yes they make a 3d map of your mouth. It’s nonsensical but here we are

Not biome, but it is pretty trivial to track:

- Brushing pressure

- How long you brush

- When you brush

- Where you brush (tracking orientation and motion)

With that, you might see some trend of "you brush your left-back-bottom teeth a little harder than the rest, and you're not quite getting your front middle teeth very well".

Now, if that data is actually useful logged and analyzed is another question.

I've got a toothbrush that theoretically has bluetooth connectivity support. I've never used it. But I do like there's a colorful ring that lights up to show the brushing pressure and I do like the 30 second timer feature to help ensure I brush each area of my mouth about the same amount of time. Neither require bluetooth and an app though.

Or do they make tooth brushes which monitor your mouth's biome or something like that these days?

I'd buy a toothbrush that did that, even if it had "AI" in it's name.

But no, I think it just logs the brush duration and for the more expensive models the "coverage", or something like that.

Most regular medical insurance isn't really insurance, in the usual sense. "Classical" insurance only pays out when something goes wrong, in defined amounts based on what's gone wrong. And while certainly insurers like to find ways not to pay out when you report a claim, there are usually far fewer gotchas with things like auto insurance, home insurance, event insurance, etc., than there is for medical insurance, where you could be denied coverage just because the "wrong" ambulance company took you to the hospital. Not to mention that anything that pays for preventative doctor/dentist/etc. visits isn't really "insurance".

But it's fine; we call it insurance anyway, and everyone knows what it means, so there's no problem.

People advertising such benefits are simply smarter than the victims of it. Same is true for loyalty coupons. Of course in the medium to long run you don't save a penny because advertisers know your price flexibility down to the last cent. You just fail to notice and have no reference to real values.

This is speculation, but maybe electric toothbrushes are going the way of TVs, in that most have “smart” features and you pay a premium for one without.

Sure, but pretty much my only considerations were the quality of brushing, cost of new brushes, and general reliability. The one I thought was best and in-budget just happened to have these anti-features too, which fortunately I don't have to use.

It wasn't worth it to me to spend more time on it to see if I could find something without the connected crap.

(And I do wonder if the connected crap makes the device cheaper, since they're hoping to make money on selling user data.)

I have seen products reported about on YouTube that used ‘ai’ to mean a timer.

Eh, I disagree. High res images are big no matter what way you cut it, and my mobile resolution is 2550x1800 - I don’t mind the detail. But I don’t need that detail for 15 different toothbrush models.

How many toothbrush models do you think the average person who downloads this app owns?

It seems rather inefficient since most users will only have one model of toothbrush.

Influencing? Ya, that's the point, influencing them to have good behaviors. Do you reward your children with broccoli?

That would be a blatant GDPR violation if there ever was one…

Fortunately for me I put my toothbrush on its own VLAN

It was definitely nothing fancy, but I found it hurtful. But maybe I just have sensitive teeth. I do get my teeth professionally cleaned every 6 months, but this is also nothing I look forward too.

https://nitter.poast.org/ is alive (but also subjects you to Cloudflare proctology)

2 minutes feels incredibly long for a lot of people.

The tiktok generation. What happens to good old sand timer technology?

Oooh! Thank you, it makes much more sense now. It is weird, though, that we humans need to be distracted to focus on brushing the teeth.

Smartphones with 32GB or less storage are not rare. I can still buy a brand-new Android phone at the local electronics chain with 32GB storage.