Misalignments between Privacy Claims and Privacy Policies in Smart Sex Toys

We present a content analysis of the privacy policy documentation and product descriptions from 146 smart sex toys across fourteen brands. We examine marketing narratives, policy accessibility, and disclosure completeness. We contribute an empirical illustration of a disregard for data privacy considerations in product descriptions and vague references to data privacy in privacy policy documentation. Among available privacy policy documentation, critical data storage and transmission details were frequently omitted or ambiguous, leading to misalignment with privacy claims in marketing materials. Our findings highlight inadequate transparency in the industry, paralleling issues in broader IoT systems and FemTech products and services. We underscore the need for HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to address the structural inefficiency of policy compliance, the need to elevate privacy as an essential feature in products that collect and store sensitive and intimate data, and the stakes of privacy in the context of digital intimacy.