Our Dental Insurance Sent Us “Free” Internet-Connected Toothbrushes

I read this article a few times, but I don’t see any quotes of actual communication from either the dental insurance or the toothbrush company. If the second box contained a letter with the purported message, why not post it? If the author received warnings about being in violation of the “free” deal, why not post them? It’s hard to tell here what has actually been said by the insurance or toothbrush vendor vs inferred by the author.

Your toothbrush certainly does not need an app. But what's the game, I wonder, for the dental insurance company? I mean, _why_ do they want your data? Aggregate data on habits? The chance to shape behavior (better habits) of customers through nags, gamification, etc? Eventually rates tied to compliance? Advertising opps?

I&#x27;d be more inclined to fall in line with their data collection practices if dental insurance wasn&#x27;t so utterly useless as an insurance product.<p>It almost always makes sense to save the premium payments up and pay out of pocket for any dental services you need.

I have the same insurance&#x2F;tooth brushes. The thing that got me was they sent one of these for my 2 year old. Same thing as for me and my wife... they know how old the kids are ( 2, 5 and 6 ).. you think they&#x27;d &quot;think of the children&quot;...

This is a great counterpoint to Google&#x27;s insistence that there doesn&#x27;t need to be a discrete &quot;Internet access&quot; permission in Android.<p>Their position is that if apps are all well-siloed then it doesn&#x27;t matter if they chat to the Cloud because they can&#x27;t leak data to which you have denied them access ( contacts, photos etc )<p>But that&#x27;s only true for on-device data; here&#x27;s an app that&#x27;s relaying data from a Bluetooth source. Data which the user would prefer it didn&#x27;t send to the Cloud. But without rooting there&#x27;s no way to stop it doing so.<p>Please Google, give us the ability to block Internet access.

This guy doesn&#x27;t understand the difference between free &#x27;you&#x27;re the product&#x27; products and free-included-with-the-product, which is actually just the cost included with the product you bought, in this case insurance. The language he uses makes it seem as though it&#x27;s OF COURSE going to be in the first category, even though it&#x27;s an extra with his insurance.<p>If they included a not-smart electric touthbrush, would he also use &#x27;free&#x27; in a suspicious way? No, because there wouldn&#x27;t be an article because it would just be part of the insurers marketing.<p>Kind of annoyed me.

And that is the number one selling feature of OneStar for car manufacturers in the US (where leases are the top way to &quot;sell&quot; cars)

Maybe I missed something in the article, but how do you know the phone app is transmitting data to the insurance company?

Surprised to find an ad at the end of this article.<p>It also uses Google Analytics.<p>What was all that about spying on your users, again?