A British private detective told the British tabloids about how an electric toothbrush revealed a cheating hubby’s extramarital affair. One of his clients was a married mother-of-two who was checking on her children’s dental hygiene habits. She installed a smartphone app that tracked the use of the family’s electric toothbrush.
The woman noticed that the brush was being used at times when the kids were at school and her husband was supposedly at work. Was there a mad tooth-brusher on the loose, breaking into homes to clean his teeth? Had her children become toothbrushing fanatics, skipping classes to use the Crest? Was the toothbrush moonlighting with another family?
No, but the truth was worse. Her husband was having sexual liaisons with his lover on mornings when his wife thought he was at work. She saw a routine: the electric toothbrush was being used on Friday mornings, and upon checking, she discovered that her louse of a spouse hadn’t arrived at his office in the city on a Friday morning in months. Instead, he had been “makin’ whoopee,” as the song goes, with a colleague right in the family home, until the electric toothbrush ratted him out.
I don’t see any unethical conduct here except for that of the illicit lovers, but I do detect a pre-unethical condition when one can’t even secretly brush one’s own teeth.
Ethics Alarms 
Never let your dinger linger, or your toothbrush will surely point it’s finger!
Worthy of Ogden Nash!
Using someone else’s toothbrush? Ewwwww.
Often, there’s one electric base with multiple, color coded brush heads that can be changed out; one for each family member. The wife detected that the base was being used at times when no one was home – except that the husband was. He was brushing his teeth – among other activities – when he should have been at work.
This raises several questions:
What is the purpose of the app? Tracking usage so you can make sure you brush twice a day for two minutes? Maybe plausible.
The “family toothbrush”? What they only have one?
Did he know she had the ability to track him usage? Probably not, or he would not have used it.
But, if he did not know, why did he not know? In other words, if she had an app with this feature, why did she not tell him about it. If it was for the children, why wouldn’t he know about it?
Granted, if you suspected your husband of cheating, tracking his toothbrush usage seems like one of the more serendipitous ways to gather evidence.
Maybe her actions were innocent. Or, maybe she suspected him of cheating and wanted to find an “innocent” way to corroborate her suspicions, as opposed to hiring a private investigator.
-Jut
Okay, I just read the article. She had hired a private investigator.
Now, I think this was a set-up that gets the investigator’s name out there.
He could have easily recommended this to her, along with any number of other ways to track people.
The toothbrush just happened to hit.
-Jut
Jut,
Upon reading this article, I immediately thought, “I could monitor how well my girls are brushing their teeth!” We have four girls, and we don’t always sit and watch each one brushing her teeth, but with the app, we could monitor when they power the toothbrush on and off…
As for one family toothbrush, you can have a single base but multiple toothbrush heads. For example, my wife and I have one electric toothbrush, but we each have our own head that we attached when we brush and remove when we’re done. So it could be one electric base for the whole family. Our girls each have their own (cheap) electric toothbrush, so that’s a different matter.
As for whether he knew about the app, I’ll be he did, but it never occurred to him that it would give him away. Sin makes us stupid in a lot of ways. And this would be especially so if it was a habit he didn’t even think about, brushing his teeth after… You get the idea.
And the tooth shall set you free…
I also detect a pre-unethical condition where the private information about the usage history of a personally-owned electric toothbrush is being collected by the manufacturer for . . . reasons.
I’d bet 10-to-1 that this app has some sort of option to send the information to the manufacturer for “diagnostic purposes” or some other bullshit reason that MAYBE you can opt out of in the app’s settings, but is on by default.
In this day and age, you should always assume that anything electronic is spying on you.
–Dwayne