Escalator temporarily stairs
I found a 350€ OralB toothbrush in a shop recently in France.
I couldn’t believe the amount of bullshit you have to cram in to up a toothbrush to that level of price.
Pic :
Does it come with a “feminine stimulation” accessory?
I have two of these i bought for $30 each
I use a website that has auctions near me that sell Amazon abandoned packages. I find these often
My sister, a dentistry student, got one in a promo event. It glows when you walk by to remind you to brush. Drove me nuts.
Why did you have to login in the first place? What’s an “Oral-B brushing experience”?
You can use the Oral B with some electric brushes to see where you have brushed and where you haven’t to help you with not missing anything.
You have brushed in New York and Philadelphia this week!
You have brushed in New York and Philadelphia this we Sorry, not sure what you mean by this (not a native English speaker)
“where you have brushed” -> either “where in your mouth” or “where you were when brushing”
It’s a data collection joke.
Suspicious activity has been detected in your toothbrush in Hong Kong. Your account has been locked for your security.
Goddammit, Oral-B, I told you I was traveling this week!
sets up VPN to trick it into brushing from home
It’s the experience of a toothbrush collecting data about your daily routines to sell for profit.
Who is interested in that data other than Oral-B and their competitors though? Oral-B isn’t collecting that data to sell to itself, and they certainly wouldn’t want their competition using it
You see, they’ll sell this information to your health insurance company, so that your premium will increase if they think you brush too seldom or not thoroughly enough.
Exactly this, but it will be sold the other way around, you’ll get a gift or a discount if you log+link data
The amount of information that can be inferred, especially when coupled with more data from other “brokers”, is crazy. You might be flagged as a depressed person if you skip brushing some/most days. The time you wake up and go to work might be an indication of your social status, together with how often you replace the head.
Ah yes, there’s a whole line forming to buy data about teeth brushing, it’s like a gold mine.
Yeah, it’s not like there’s money in dental products… Oh wait.
Tooth brushes are under one euro. Tooth paste is around one euro. Both last like a a couple of months. Floss and inter-dental brushes are a couple of euros.
Not everything is implants and high tech drills, the consumer products to take care of your teeth are cheap as fuck. Unless you volunteer to buy the toothbrush with leds, Bluetooth and timer, but that’s a tech toy, not a dental product.
Have you ever seen how expensive braces are?
An over engineered toothbrush is a dental product just as much as a very cheap one and there are for sure greedy people interested in trying to get people to log their brushing data on a corporate cloud and later link together their insurance and their dental habits at some point and there are for sure people willing to pay for detailed brushing data. It’s just the very beginning of it all still. Give it 20 years, your insurance company or dentist will ask you how come you’re not logging your brushing.
You joke, but I guarantee there’s a market. Consider health insurance companies that see an opportunity to charge everyone more unless they can prove their good brushing habits via app data.
I think it’s a conspiracy theory. The vast majority of people use manual brushes. Of those who use electric ones, a majority use dumb ones. Of those who use smart ones, some people don’t use the app. Or don’t bother opening the app every time they brush. Those who register probably don’t provide insurance info. The data they collect is basically useless for individual cases, and definitely useless on a bigger scale.
My take is that it’s a gimmick to help sell you more expensive brushes when you are browsing and comparing them.
It’s not about user-led synergy. The personal data market is slurped up by those that already have and are building correlations. Just because a user didn’t report anything to their insurer doesn’t mean an insurer sure as shit isn’t going to want the data if they can link it to the user whatsoever, so long as it will make them more money.
This is hypothetical, of course, but it’s the way the market of data brokers works.
Yeah, my understanding is that companies generate this data and just sell it unprocessed to data harvesting companies who link it with other data they’ve been sold. Companies seeking targeted info can then request data with varying levels of depth.
Like a company may request a list of emails of users who are very good (or bad) about brushing their teeth everyday to target ads at
We have recently gotten ourselves some SURI toothbrushes and they are eco friendly, repairable, the heads are recyclable/ biodegradable. They also give a better clean than my old oral b electric. Quieter too. Highly recommend.
How repairable are we talking? Can the battery be replaced?
Yup, you need to send it back to them but for a few quid (or included if you have their replacement head subscription) they will change the battery for you.
Oof, I’m not sure I’d call that repairable. That’s iPhone levels of repairable.
I have the cheapest oral-b (bought for under 20 euros about a decade ago) and it uses AA-batteries, a pair of rechargeable ikea 1900mah batteries last for about 100 cumulative minutes of usage.
I considered a wifi toothbrush for my kids. Teaching them dental hygiene gets harder with age. At some point the youngest started ignoring brush your teeth, I had to hang out near the bathroom to make sure he brushed. I was pondering… you know it home assistant can read the site, I could just have it shit out an alarm if he hasn’t brushed by x hour…
but then he gave in and started brushing
Communism is when no toothbrush… Capitalism is when no toothbrush…
Because you don’t want someone else using your toothbrush on your account. Do you?
Having to log back in is just part of the Oral-B Brushing Experience™
I prefer the cheap-fucking manual brush my dentist gives me every visit experience.
Hey everybody! Get a look at Money Bags over here being able to afford to go to the dentist!
(kidding, low key jealous… please marry me so I can have benefits/health coverage)
Who said I go frequently? It’s been ages. I really need a new brush, too… 😔
Rhod Gilbert on toothbrush is worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet.
I wonder if it’s so you can get a calendar of usage tines. Could be handy to ensure kids are brushing for the right amount of time?
It does that plus map areas you are missing. Probably overkill for most but could be a good teaching tool as you suggest.
If you meet a man who has been logged out of his toothbrush, do not mourn him. He has chosen thus. He is exactly where he has desired to be.
But any man’s toothbrush logout diminishes me
Because I am involved in brushing my teeth
Mourn for this man, not for his choices but for his lack of them; a store selling expired milk should be put out of business by the authorities, not by a mob of post-poisoned shoppers.
That’s communist talk. Those shoppers should have done their research before buying bad milk.
That’s free-market naïveté . No one has the time to be an expert in every field to always make the informed choice.
Do you read the labels on tangerines to check which antibiotics were used against citrus-greening? Do you even know if that’s something you should be worrying about? Is Anti-Microbial Resistance something to legitimately be afraid of when buying tangerines?
(I leave this as an exercise for the so-called informed reader…)
I hope you understand that my comment was sarcastic…
Plenty of progressives who lean on the “vote-with-your-wallet” rhetoric. Can never be too careful.
Imagine explaining the concept of this to a 16th century peasant, let alone some rich person from the 2000s, like nobody would’ve ever been ready to comprehend the existence of a wi-fi enabled toothbrush.
My toothbrush is as dumb as it comes. The only smart thing it does is charging itself when I put it in its charger base. And that should be the standard.
No reason to even use electricity. A damp cloth and some baking soda works just as well!
Pfft baking soda? Don’t you know certain tree species’ twigs work just as well?
(not AI)Although my comment was making fun of electric toothbrushes being “as dumb as they come,” this is actually pretty cool.
Ngl, I just ordered some online to throw in my day pack.
Uh, looking that up, it really doesn’t seem to be true.
It was sarcasm. They were making fun of the comments.
Oh, alright, I guess…
I mean, it looks more like you got logged out of your app.
For now.
Why? Because you were dumb enough to buy, or manipulated into buying the toothbrush.
Well-deserved, IMO.
Woah, slow down (both of you). As a person who was THIS close to buying one of those in a store:
the packaging really hides how obnoxious these things are. I only noticed a small ~“wireless” symbol on the packaging last second. Seeing that symbol then reminded me of this amazing writeup I had stumbled upon months earlier by coincidence. Only then did I realize what I was about to get myself into.
Don’t blame people who don’t happen to read niche reverse engineering blogs for fun.
Do blame companies that invest heavily into making shitty products without being up front about it.
