SoulCycle At-Home Bike

In real life, before the pandemic, SoulCycle had a reputation as a company that wasn’t exactly known for its strong moral compass. Now that SoulCycle has moved a lot of its business online with its $2,500 connected exercise bike and $40-a-month app full of workouts with SoulCycle instructors, what does that questionable moral compass mean when it comes to your privacy?

While SoulCycle says they don’t “generally sell” personal information (vague terms in privacy policies are a red flag for us), they do say they collect and share a good deal of personal information. They say they collect standard types of personal information like name, birthday, gender, location, and workout preferences. They also say they collect information about you from data brokers, social networks, advertising partners, and publicly available sources. So it seems SoulCycle likes to gather as much information on you as they can to do things like sell you more products, target you with ads, and even something we don’t usually see in a privacy policy, “To protect us and others.” Again, those vaguely worded privacy policy clauses are a red flag.

All in all, what SoulCycle does isn’t great. Buying data from data brokers feels pretty scummy to us, always. It also doesn’t seem to be super unusual in the home workout equipment world. The biggest difference with SoulCycle is they have that questionable moral reputation to live with.