Sonos says its privacy policy change wasn’t for dubious reasons

After a change to its privacy policy drew a lot of attention last week, Sonos has responded and insists it’s still carefully protecting the personal data of its customers. The company removed a line — “Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers” — from its US privacy statement earlier this month.

But Sonos claims the reason wasn’t scandalous; the company says it cut the sentence because it was overly broad and already could’ve been viewed as untrue depending on individual state privacy laws surrounding consumer data.

“Sonos uses several modern and industry-standard marketing tools, including third party service providers and social media platforms, to help us identify and display relevant ads and marketing communications,” spokesperson Julia Fasano told The Verge by email. “Any data that is shared in this process is hashed or otherwise pseudonymized, ensuring that our customers personal information remains protected and private and Sonos does not sell personal data.”

The statement goes on to address the specific change:

The Privacy Statement was updated to reflect that the use of these practices may fall within the definition of “sale / share” under US state privacy laws. To learn more about the specifics, customers can refer to the Communication, Marketing and Advertising section of the Privacy Statement and can always opt out of data sharing by sending an email to privacy@sonos.com. 

In effect, the company is saying that nothing is materially different about the updated privacy policy, which was criticized by repair technician and consumer privacy advocate Louis Rossmann. This might not have become such a controversy if the change hadn’t followed Sonos’ much-criticized new mobile app, which is still seeing frequent updates to restore old functionality.

Just today, Sonos updated the app again and brought numerical values back to its volume sliders, among other tweaks (like a mute button returning on Android). The ability to queue songs, which was somehow lost in the redesign, also returned last week. CEO Patrick Spence has defended the overhauled app and told me it will ultimately allow the company to roll out improvements faster than ever before. “We basically took a monolith and broke it into modular parts, which allows us to move faster in certain elements,” he said.