Location mandatory

So why buy a connected device? 

If you use an Alexa voice command to stream Spotify on a Sonos device, then Spotify has to have some sort of agreement with Amazon, Amazon has to have an agreement with Sonos, and Sonos has to have an agreement with Spotify. When playing this method, Amazon is just passing the command to play music on to Sonos, it’s not actually involved in the playback.  This is unlike using airplay or bluetooth, where your phone is doing the playback and passing the audio on to a separate speaker.

Also, as I said before, the local government will also have licenses and regulations that need to be met.  In the US, for example, wifi devices and microphones have to met FCC requirements. In some places, this may be an easy task, but Sonos would still have to do the work to be in compliance.  

This is not true.  You can play music files from a shared drive on a computer or NAS.  Certain file types would not be supported of course.  Alternatively, you could use airplay to send audio from your mackbook to your Sonos.  Sonos speakers can also play music services directly.  The Sonos app is just a controller.

But your Sonos product isn’t bluetooth so it’s not relevant.  As well, as was stated earlier, Sonos is asking for your location so that it can help setup any service that it can in your location.  It’s not a matter of you picking a service you want, say you only want to use airplay, then asking your location to see if you can legally use airplay at your location. 

Then why didn’t you just get a ‘dumb’ bluetooth speaker?

Your macbook has airplay, so you could use that.  But again, if you wanted a speaker with bluetooth, why did you buy a speaker that doesn’t have bluetooth?  This is like buying a truck and complaining that it doesn’t have a trunk.

Connected to what?

I bought a good quality speaker for my TV connected by optical input and capable of being a node on my local network across which I can stream music it to from compatible music services and/or networks to drives.

@dabo I’m with you up until this point

It’s not a question of freedom or control, it’s just about choice. You don’t have to use Sonos.

Just as an FYI, you didn’t use to have to provide your location when setting up a speaker, Sonos allowed you to skip this and still set it up. This was about 4 years ago. You could set your country and postal code (ie not precise location) in your user profile and music services would be available through that, you didn’t have to give precise location in the app.  But at around the same time they launched Sonos Radio and started selling user data to third parties. Moving forward I think it’s safe to assume that they will increase efforts to monetize users, through selling additional data or software subscriptions etc. If this bothers you now, likely will get worse for you. You can block a lot (most? all?) of the Sonos telemetry by blocking certain urls and domains, so you don’t have to willing give up all your data. But if this type of thing bothers you, make the choice to return it.

So where did you find Sonos sells personal data?

It’s in the privacy policy. Advertisers on Sonos Radio. They will sell your location as well as identifying information.

Can you provide some evidence for this claim?

https://www.sonos.com/en-us/legal/privacy#legal-2023-privacy-share-info-container

Yes, Sonos radio is a subscription service, except where it’s ad based.  Every streaming service is subscription or ad based, except in the rare case where they are supported by user donations.  I don’t see why this is controversial.  Will Sonos offer other subscription model sources of income?  Quite possibly.  I can’t imagine Sonos would ever charge a fee for a feature or service they currently provide without an additional charge.

@melvimbe it is in the privacy policy. If you don’t feel like reading it all, you may need to search for “Share” because this is how they refer to it - but depending on where you live and the data they are sharing (it isn’t just Sonos Radio advertisers I gave that as an example), the correct legal term would be sell - which again is in the privacy policy.

It isn’t controversial.

It isn’t nefarious stuff, the policy is easy to understand. Sonos aren’t trying to hide anything.

Advertising Partners

If you decide to use Sonos Radio, we will share a subset of your information with third party advertising companies to present, via Sonos Products, interest-based ads for features, products, and services that might be of interest to you. Specifically, we share the following information with our advertising partners: location, language, and genre of the station you are currently listening to (which is not based on your overall listening history). We will share information with advertisers, which describes the overall listening audience in general. We may also share limited location information and identifiers (i.e. an IP address) with some of our third party radio content partners who may run ads on their stations.

That’s not exactly selling your user data,  since they aren’t directly selling it, but I can see where some would not want that.  Not a big issue though as you can avoid that just by not using Sonos radio.

Share is being used here as a synonym for sell. Depending on where you live, sonos’s use of share would meet the legal definition of sell. Share sounds better right? This is in the privacy policy.

Edited to add:  I can’t link to an example directly but here’s a screen capture where they say they are selling the data.