Sonos Draws More Customer Anger - This Time For Its Privacy Policy

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been a rocky couple of months for Sonos -- so much so that CEO Patrick Spence now has a canned autoreply for customers emailing him to vent about the redesigned app. But as the company works to right the ship, restore trust, and get the new Sonos Ace headphones off to a strong start, it finds itself in the middle of yet another controversy.

As highlighted by repair technician and consumer privacy advocate Louis Rossmann, Sonos has made a significant change to its privacy policy, at least in the United States, with the removal of one key line. The updated policy no longer contains a sentence that previously said, "Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers." That pledge is still present in other countries, but it's nowhere to be found in the updated US policy, which went into effect earlier this month.

So Sonos is already selling personal information!

[oldgraybeard]

previously said, "Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers."

"Will not"

[omnichad]

I guess when you make promises about the future, you can change them at any time.

Follow the money :)

[Teun]

This shows us where the money is (made).

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[Anonymous Coward]

no it doesn't. Sonos is a hardware company, it makes money selling hardware. Part of its service is aggregating other streaming services because it is complementary, not because that's "where the money is (made)".

One of those streaming services is Sonos Radio, a free ad supported service. Seems plausible they would try to increase profits by selling information from that and potentially other services they aggregate, especially if they're seeing hardware sales level out or drop. It may not yet be the bulk of their profits, but in today's increase quarterly results at all costs environment, this kind of change isn't a very far leap.

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[Teun]

What I mean is for Sonos there's more money to be made in the US.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[dfghjk]

"... if a product needs a "privacy policy" when there are options that do the same thing that simply do not need such a policy, it is probably best left to those who want to be spied on..."

Sounds great until you consider the details. It is probably NOT your "headphones" spying on you, Sonos or otherwise, it's the streaming service you are using to access music that is. With Sonos that could be the Sonos app, thus the need for a privacy policy. For YOUR headphones maybe not, since they do not stream music

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Can'tNot]

This appears to be genuine, this account really was deleted. I didn't know that was possible. How do you do that?

Please die

[Pascal Sartoretti]

I have a few Sonos devices. I used to really like them, I have recommended them to many friends and relatives. Last month, I moved to a new appartment and had to reconfigure the whole system. I had no choice but to migrate to the new version of the Sonos application (which I had avoided, given all the negative feedback). It was a mess. The new application is bad. And now this thing about privacy. Congratulations, Sonos. You turned a loyal customer into someone who hates you.

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[Gilgaron]

I had heard good things about them and got a Roam as a gift and it is just the most perplexing device. It is barely more useful than a traditional bluetooth speaker (except it requires an app and an account and god help you if you take it traveling and are off your network and need to fix things....) and while use cases where it is better than one occasionally arise I always have to fight it for 10 minutes to get it to work. If I'd paid for it I'd be pissed but as is it comes in handy sometimes?

On Sale

[sunderland56]

Not sure if it's related, but a few days after the last story broke, my stereo store had Sonos gear on a big sale. Maybe next week prices will be slashed even more?

I know CEOs don't realize this, but if you treat your customers like crap, they'll buy elsewhere.

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[TaliesinWI]

Lots of stereo stores fell below the Sonos "preferred dealer" sales thresholds during the pandemic, so now that they have to order through the regular channels, their margins are razor thin. As a result, many of them simply chose to blow out their inventory and stop pushing it as a solution, while nominally remaining a dealer so they could special order whatever they want if a customer with a existing Sonos system comes in.

Most boutique stores were really only keeping it because the ZP and Connect series w