Kinsa, a smart thermometer startup that raised ~$29M via VCs like Kleiner Perkins, has products in 500K+ US homes and sells “illness data” to Clorox and others
Most of what we do — the websites we visit, the places we go, the TV shows we watch, the products we buy — has become fair game for advertisers. Tweets: @fmanjoo , @nytimestech , @rebeccadrobbins , @zeynep , and @zeynep Tweets: Farhad Manjoo / @fmanjoo : Data from internet-of-things devices are being used for ads now, @sapna reports. One smart thermometer company is selling “illness data.” UGH. http://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimestech : “Illness data” is unique, Kinsa says, because it comes straight from someone's household in real time. People don't have to visit a doctor or search their symptoms on Google for the company to know where a spike might be occurring. http://www.nytimes.com/... Rebecca Robbins / @rebeccadrobbins : Clorox targeted its disinfecting wipe ads to ZIP codes around the country that had increases in fevers. The data came from a smart thermometer company based in SF, because of course it did http://www.nytimes.com/... Zeynep Tufekci / @zeynep : Half a million American households are having their fever data uploaded and sold to advertisers, integrated into databases, and who-knows-what and I bet almost very few them either realize what is happening or potential implications. Nobody is looking out for people. Zeynep Tufekci / @zeynep : Don't buy internet-connected anything if there's a non-internet connected version or an OVERWHELMING reason connect to the internet, part zillion. This example looks benign, but I can think of a few dozen terrible uses of this data off the top of my head. http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Kinsa is the latest entry in a pattern the coverage has been documenting for years: health signals leaking out of the home into advertising pipelines. Health websites were already shipping medical search data to third parties back in 2015 (health sites sending medical-search troves to third parties), and by 2019 popular apps were passing heart rates and pregnancy intent to Facebook through its analytics SDK (apps sharing sensitive health data with Facebook).
What makes this installment distinct is the source: a physical device sitting in over 500,000 households, funded by ~$29M from Kleiner Perkins and others, capturing fever data before anyone visits a doctor or types a symptom into a search box. That puts Kinsa closer to Samba TV, which turned 13.5M smart TVs into an ad-targeting asset (Samba TV's smart-TV viewing data) than to traditional health-data brokers — and reporters including Zeynep Tufekci are flagging the privacy implications publicly.
First-order effects
- Clorox and other buyers gain a real-time, pre-diagnosis illness signal tied to specific households — something neither health systems nor search logs can deliver at that latency.
- Kinsa faces immediate reputational pressure: the same VC-backed growth story now reads as 'selling your family's fevers,' with journalists amplifying the concern to a mainstream audience.
Second-order effects
- Every connected-health device maker now has a proven monetization template — hardware at a subsidy, data as the business — forcing competitors to choose between matching Kinsa's model or marketing themselves as the privacy alternative.
- Advertisers buying household-level illness signals undercut the slower, consent-heavy path Google is pursuing with health systems like Ascension (Google needing Ascension's patient data), because Kinsa's data arrives without negotiating with hospitals at all.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer health data becomes a two-track market: an unregulated IoT track flowing straight to advertisers, and a regulated clinical track locked inside health systems — with the IoT track growing faster precisely because it avoids the gatekeepers.
- The backlash also sets up Kinsa's pivot visible in later coverage, where its fever maps get reframed as a public-good tool for tracking outbreaks like COVID-19 (Kinsa thermometers used to track COVID-19 spread) — dual-use positioning that may become the standard defense for illness-data businesses under scrutiny.
The trend: Household IoT devices are becoming the newest front door for health-data advertising, capturing bodily signals earlier and with fewer intermediaries than either health sites or hospital partnerships ever could.