Did you get enough sleep last night? Do your eyelids feel heavy, or your head hurt? Maybe you’re looking forward to a second or third coffee of the day.
You’re not alone. The results of a national Sleep Health Foundation survey found that 66% of Australians report to have at least one sleep problem, and over 48% report two sleep problems (Adams et al., 2017).
More and more apps have been flooding the market, offering self-tracking, customised alarms and sleep science as a way out of poor “sleep hygiene”. But to sign on to these sleep solutions, consumers will need to trade away their rights to privacy.
A world of data
The internet has us tangled up in each other’s lives, 24/7. Once upon a time, we had to go to a computer to “go on the internet” – now, we live amongst the internet of things, where even the most mundane objects are networked. It’s not just phones and voice-activated speakers, either: everything from microwaves to water taps are becoming “smart”. The internet surrounds us.
We’re also a part of it: our interactions go straight to the Cloud, collected by the companies which run our social networks, our email servers, our apps. Scholar Shoshanna Zuboff says we’re living in the age of surveillance capitalism: where the flows of capital depend on surveillance (2020). In this “always-on” world, we are always-interacting, and these interactions provide the perfect ecosystem for corporations to harvest our data, and sell it for their own profit. They look behind the interface, collecting our preferences, listening to our utterances and following our gazes to see what best gets our attention.
The final frontier
In his book 24/7, Jonathan Crary notes that sleep is the final frontier yet to be subsumed by capitalism:
“Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life–hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship–have been remade into commodified or financialised forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.” (2014, p. 10-11)
Capitalism’s demands for more work and consumption has eroded away at sleep for decades (he notes that the average American sleeps six and a half hours, in contrast to the 10 hours once slept at the start of the 20th century (p.11)), but it can’t make us check emails or watch ads or impulse buy in our sleep. God knows it would if it could.
Except – what about the sleep-tracking app?
The “Quantified Self” movement
We invest so much in a good night’s sleep: it’s the only thing we really have control over anymore, and as work and commerce vies for our attention we find ourselves clawing back at those night hours. No wonder sleep-tracking apps have been flooding the market.
The concept of a “quantified self” came about in 2007 from Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, editors of Wired magazine. Soon, groups of people interested in using technology to “lifelog” began to form, before becoming a movement with bases across the world (Lupton, 2016). The contemporary quantified self tracks “physical activity, food intake, vital signs and even their personal genome through digital services”. Self-tracking eventually became so popular that in 2023, Apple released “Health”, a fitness and sleep-tracker that comes default with the iPhone, making the self-tracking app essential.
Experts have become concerned with risks to self-tracking: some self-trackers may be using these apps as a form of self-harm or restriction, becoming associated with orthorexia, an unhealthy preoccupation with healthy eating, and orthosomnia, an unhealthy preoccupation with perfecting sleep.
In her book on this self-tracking movement, Deborah Lupton is concerned that self-tracking practices are a form of self-surveillance; the user now volunteers herself to be watched, making her easy to exploit (2016). Jathan Sadowski adds in his book on digital capitalism that the pervasiveness of this fact “[blows us] apart into increasingly more streams of data. We are atomised … for the purpose of accumulation, analysis, and actionable insights” (2020, p.5). Because we have been atomised, we also become easier to control and analyse.
Tech millionaire Bryan Johnson believes he can cheat death. His self-tracking is obsessive: he shares his own statistics online regularly, and, troublingly, once shared his and his 19-year old son’s “nighttime erection data”. Not only is obsessive self-tracking an unhealthy (and perhaps even abusive) form of bodily control and corporate control, but it also dehumanises. Are we complex human beings made up of a series of irreducible, unquantifiable memories, relationships, sensations and desires, embedded in the world we live in? Or are we just data to be exploited?
Reading the fine print
When you sign up to a social media platform or an app, you will often be asked to sign off on some Terms and Conditions. Hidden in lines of jargon – which many find too difficult to parse – are terms about the use of user data. Most people sign off on the Terms and Conditions without reading; one study even found that 98% of users – failing to read the Terms and Conditions properly – signed off on giving away their first born child (Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018). It’s not that consumers don’t care about what happens to their data, either. A study conducted in Australia found that 78% of participants want to know what social media companies do with their personal data (Goggin et al., 2017).
Yet companies deliberately shroud the details of how data is used. Frank Pasquale, a legal expert on AI, algorithms and machine learning, argues that secrecy is key to the operations of companies today. We know that companies are collecting our data en masse, and we know they must be making lots of money doing it, but we don’t know who uses it and what it’s used for. Companies have become “black boxes” “like the data-monitoring systems in planes, trains, and cars. Or it can mean a system whose workings are mysterious” (Pasquale, 2015, p. 3).
So those who read the Terms and Conditions are unlikely to find much but vague terms anyway: that their data may be sold to “third-parties”. Who are these third-parties, and what do they do with our data?
Data surveillance
“Femtech” apps are menstruation and sexual health trackers typically aimed at women. They’ve been on the rise in the last few years, but have also been the subject of scrutiny for their data surveillance. In an analysis of these apps by Katherine Kemp, an expert in consumer protection and data privacy, these apps ask users to give up incredibly intimate details of themselves, such as pregnancy test results, what kind of contraception they used or whether they had an orgasm during sex. She also found that some apps are misleading about their privacy policy, hold onto personal data for too long, and that data isn’t reliably anonymous. This puts an already vulnerable group – women and trans people – at risk of having their data used for their “discrimination, exploitation, humiliation or blackmail” (Kemp, 2023).
Data profiling is when data is collected and creates an image of you, in data: it can record your preferences for certain kinds of products, but they can also collect very intimate data, like menstruation apps and health apps do. Apps and websites collect your data and sell them on to “third parties” known more specifically as data brokers, who in turn find other sources to sell to. They may sell data to researchers, companies, or the government. Since data changes hands so many times, the provenance of data is obscured, further darkening the “black box”.
The repercussions of data profiling can be varied: while most people are aware of how data profiling identifies what might be advertised to them, data profiles can also be used to figure out if you should get a mortgage, be shortlisted for a job, be approved for parole, or receive a visa (McGregor et al., 2018). For some time, the boom in genetic testing technology – allowing users to track their genetic data – raised fears about how the data was being used. Genetic testing services can discover if someone is genetically predisposed to cancer or other health risks. Before a law was passed in Australia in 2024, there was real anxiety that lack of policy around such data could be used by insurance companies to discriminate against people. 23andMe, a genetic testing company known for poor data security, threatened to go bust last year, throwing the future of the genetic data of millions into question (Prictor, 2024).
In other words, governments and companies alike can purchase your data to figure out if you meet certain conditions. Why you have been approved or denied for something won’t be transparent to you.
Civil rights advocates were concerned for users of Femtech apps like Flo and Clue in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 due to these data profiles: police could theoretically use this data to keep track of those who are pregnant, and those who are no longer.
What does this mean for sleep-tracking apps?
Though we know little about how the data being sold from sleep-tracking apps are being used (it’s a black box, remember?), what we do know is that in these apps, corporations find a way to make money off of us even as we sleep.
Sleep-tracking apps cause some other raised eyebrows about how data may be used against users. Pokémon Sleep (a sleep-tracking app that rewards users for sleeping well by allowing them to collect rarer Pokémon) has in its privacy policy that not only are they allowed to share user data with third-parties, but that data such as keystrokes may be collected. Apps like Pokémon Sleep call into question the kind of intimate data that can be collected on children.
Pokémon Sleep and many others also use the microphone to measure sleep, a worrying breach of privacy made casual with gamification. Professor Nathan Hulsey, an expert in media studies, suggests that the mixing of play and data is especially pernicious:
“Play acts as the “soft edge” of surveillance technologies, allowing them to colonise social structures and communities without friction”. (2020, p. 26)
Additionally, those tracking poor sleep hygiene may inexplicably find they’re being approved for less insurance coverage than they would otherwise expect.
Consumers must also assess how their data might be used for research – and not just medical research, but military research, too. If this seems like a stretch, consider that data brokers have sold data to the US military before for use in (illegally) tracking down protestors and for immigration control. There is a precedent for military interest in sleep research and data: for decades the US Defense Department has been studying the white-crowned sparrow – a bird known to fly as long as seven days straight without sleeping – to find ways of helping humans go without sleep while remaining fully functioning in combat scenarios (Crary, 2014, p. 1-2).
As discussed earlier, though studies find that people typically care about what happens to their data, a study of Australian self-trackers found that most were not concerned about how third parties such as “software developers, government agencies or hackers” might use their data. This seems to suggest that for self-trackers, the benefits of tracking their health data outweighs the risks. However, other findings in this study suggest that self-trackers were only aware of how third parties used their data for advertising: none considered that they may be data profiled for use in insurance, banking, and law enforcement (Lupton, 2021).
So what needs to be done?
On an individual level, it’s better to see a doctor specialising in sleep than to rely on a sleep-tracking app for help. In some instances, it’s been found that sleep apps can in fact worsen sleep. Though many sleep apps claim to be able to track sleep cycles such as REM or deep sleep, they have been proven to be inaccurate (Baron et al., 2017). For keeping track of sleep length, though, sleep apps can be useful, and some are designed to induce a better state of sleep or gently wake users. Others can help to diagnose sleep apnoea, an under-diagnosed disorder that can lead to other medical issues like depression and heart problems.
Kemp argues that though Australia has a law in place designed to protect consumers from data profiling, the law is unenforceable due to easy-to-find loopholes. We can start to change things on a large-scale level by making that law enforceable, and continue to create laws that allow users to reclaim their agency and have some transparency around the use of their own data (Kemp, 2022).
It has been said before that having the choice as to whether or not to opt out of data is a position of privilege (Marwick and boyd, 2018). Taking the cost of seeing a specialist in mind in the midst of a cost of living crisis, it makes sense that many would turn to apps to improve their sleep – but without the ability to see into the black box of surveillance capitalism, who knows how much of themselves they’ll have to sell to do so.
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