Some customers of mattress-maker Sleep Number noticed an alarming passage in the company's privacy policy this week: It said it may record "audio in your room to detect snoring and similar sleep conditions."

Sleep Number quickly called the terms a "mistake" and clarified that the beds do not in fact have microphones or audio recording capability. The company has now revised its privacy policy.

But the customers were right to be alarmed. A spokesperson for the company told CNBC that a prototype was in the works to enable audio snoring detection, but was not launched, and this was the product to which the legal notice referred. One of the company's higher-end bed models does have a snoring function, but it only allows a partner to push a button and raise his or her snoring partner's side of the bed, a manual process that requires no recording, the spokesperson said.

The fact is, despite legislation meant to alleviate some of the confusion over privacy regulations, consumers still often have to rely on their eagle-eyed counterparts reading pages of documentation and posting their findings to Twitter. That's a scary prospect, as more and more of our everyday devices go online and we live more of our lives connected -- even when we're sleeping.