Forget Your Microwave Spying: Now Your Sex Toy Might Be Spying On You!

An evening with your sex toy is an evening well spent.  At least, that's what you would assume... For all the fun and pleasure that pleasuring yourself brings, it can also bring in some outsiders.  No, there's no toy that has the power to bring you a date, but there is one that definitely brings you're having fun with yourself.  It seems terrifying, but it's true.  Keep reading find out how your sex toy could be spying on you.

Infused with technology. We’re living in an era where technology has infused itself into our daily lives. Whether it’s in the car, at home or even in the bedroom, technology is everywhere. However if you’ve ever seen any science fiction movie, then you’ll know that this sort of thing doesn’t typically end well.

Pesky little sex toys. If you’ve bought a sex toy recently, then you may very well have been spied on, specifically if you bought a sex toy called We-Vibe, with an app called We-Connect. Naturally, the name is referring to couples connecting with each other, but according to BBC News, it’s also about couples connecting the toy’s manufacturers.

They are watching. The sex toy was created by a company in Ottawa, Canada called Standard Innovation that specializes in sex toys, and it turns out that they’ve been tracking data on its users. Basically, if you’ve ever used the We-Connect app during sex, you’ve had a company spying on you to find out how you have sex.

Found out. Thankfully, this issue was discovered and brought to court. What’s even better is that the company was called out for its creepy business and is being forced to make a substantial payout to its customers in the form of roughly four million dollars.

How it all works. So, in order to understand how the hell this even happened, it helps to know how the sex toy actually works. Couples using the vibrator can control the settings through the sex toy’s app, We-Connect. However, the app was storing information and sending it directly to the company for research purposes.

Getting paid. If you go out now and purchase one of these sex toys, you’re sh*t out of luck because the lawsuit won’t include you. The only people who are going to have a taste of that four million dollars are customers who purchased the product before September 26th of 2016.

Splitting it up. Now, speaking of all that money, of the four million dollars, how much money are these customers expecting to earn from this lawsuit? It depends. If you have the toy, but never activated the app, then you’ll get up to $199. However, if you activate the app, then you’ll get up to $10,000.

In the right? Now, obviously no one wants to have their privacy messed with, but do you think the company was behaving in a truly criminal way, or were they just trying to improve the sexual experience for its customers. How else would they understand how to improve their devices in order to truly satisfy their customers?

This is the future. Now, just because these kinds of sex toys are available, that doesn’t mean you need to use them. However, they are definitely going to saturate the sex toy market. The powerless toys of the past are taking a backseat to new and improved products frankly because they just don’t compare.

Other sex toy companies. Ann Summers is a retail chain that supplies their customers with sex toys, and they’ve seen quite a shift in the way sex toys are manufactured. Kyrsty Hazell-Page, a spokesperson for the company, explains that sex toys of the future are a far cry from what they used to be, but because that’s just how the world works now.

Battery-powered and onward. Hazell-Page explains that Ann Summers has had to keep up with the times ever since they opened. She said, "Our company has been around since the early 1970s. Back then, products didn't even vibrate. Then they moved from battery-powered to USB-charged, then came apps and now virtual reality is the next big thing."

Why even bother? So, with all these privacy issues, where is the benefit in purchasing a sex toy that has the ability to connect to an app? For one, you can control the intensity of the vibrator by simply using the phone. The added benefit, however, is that you can control it on your partner even if they aren’t in the same room — or even in the same state.

Collecting data. Even though Standard Innovation stands behind its claim that it simply wanted to collect data in order to improve the user experience, all it did was make some users feel violated. Due to this, the company had no other choice but to settle. Otherwise, it could have destroyed them.

Learning from past mistakes. Other sex toy companies are learning from these mistakes (and are just happy it didn’t happen to them). Hazell-Page added that, “We have to be really mindful as it is really important that we protect customers' safety and data in everything we do.”

Horny and rich. OK, so what Standard Innovation did was pretty sneaky, but at the end of the day, no one was directly affected, as in no one had their identities stolen. Their information wasn’t made public, and it’s not as though pictures or videos of them were released. Now, they can enjoy using their own sex toys (probably not the battery-operated ones) and the cash that’s going directly into their accounts.