macOS controller and Apple Silicon

oh, interesting.

I think there are DCMA (privacy issues, but damned if I know what they really are) regarding uploading personal data to a web server, and back down to a ‘system’. 
 

The challenge I see is album art is public anyway, but playlist names and the contents thereof are private…but I’m no lawyer, trying to navigate all of the various jurisdiction’s laws, either. I have done some work in copyright issues, but I’m still no lawyer. But I bet it is complex, legally. Laws just aren’t always written to benefit the public, and things get ‘hinky’ quickly. 

good point. it’s a common issue - “bast practice” seems to be encrypting such data so that it can never be spied on. That said, not everyone does this.

I don’t know if each country/jurisdiction recognizes encryption as an appropriate response to privacy issues. In general, I tend to agree with you, though. 
 

I suspect at least one of the challenges Sonos has to meet is the wide variety of laws/regulations across the world. What’s fine in the US/UK/EU may not be acceptable in other jurisdictions. I know it already rears its head with carrying BBC content, all of which isn’t licensed across all jurisdictions. I can only imagine it’s worse (or at least equally complicated) for other things.

There’s a reason why people employ VPNs, but Sonos doesn’t want to be sideswiped by random lawsuits, I suspect. They spend enough legal monies on defending their own patents.

OTOH, this is all speculation, from an outside user. 

Encryption only protects privacy if nobody else has the keys to yours. If the place you are sending the data needs to decrypt and act on it they still face the privacy rules once they open it.

If nobody but you has the keys, and you misplace yours, the data is locked forever. Couple family members found that out when they failed to make backups of their keys on a second device and had a drive failure. They of course are mad at the company for not being able to unlock their data. Sonos likely wants to avoid that situation.

I think sonos is a “single user” system, isn’t it? Doesn’t seem like an issue, as “my sonos” will always have “my keys” locally. yes?

I don’t know. Nominally, for most of us, I think yes, but legally might be slightly different, especially given the number of ‘corporate’ accounts. Like I say, I am not a lawyer, nor am I very familiar with the various legal complications I think they need to be aware of, and deal with. And there’s some sense, from a financial standpoint, not to support different versions of the software in a particular ‘area’.

Creating software is a challenge, especially as it relates to copyright and privacy concerns, which I think Sonos does. 

SONOS could store a copy of your library metadata on their servers and then use an AI approach to build the web browser pages. All sorts of features could be added, such as song lyrics and access to the artist website. This might result in somewhat faster performance for the user, compared to current performance, but I wouldn’t expect SONOS to do this at no extra charge to the consumer.

I haven't  cared enough to identify what data of mine My Sonos  needs to function but if it is none then you could just make a local copy of the web page and skip connecting to the Sonos servers.

If you are concerned about the data in transit, that is encrypted between you and the Sonos server, your browser will show you the details. 

As long as nobody else needs access to the data local only keys would be possible, but then nobody would be able to provide any service that needed access to your data. Also why bother to encrypt local data that never leaves your system? Encryption and decryption use CPU cycles that could be used for other purposes and encrypted data isn't very compressable, not good in a low memory system.

MiSonos is a free open source controller I wrote to run on my LAN. I run it on my Mac (Intel is fine) and it has a web interface as well as a PWA so you can run it on your phone. Search for “misonos” on github.com to check it out.