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Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu, over at Gizmodo, write about wiring Kashmir's apartment with as many "smart" gadgets as possible and then observing the data flow. Some of the telemetry streams are not encrypted, some are. Both are observable by the companies they report to, but even those that are encrypted still tell the network in between a lot about the inhabitants of the house and their activities based on when they happen and their volume.
In December, I converted my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a "smart home." I connected as many of my appliances and belongings as I could to the internet: an Amazon Echo, my lights, my coffee maker, my baby monitor, my kid's toys, my vacuum, my TV, my toothbrush, a photo frame, a sex toy, and even my bed.
[...] What our experiment told us is that all the connected devices constantly phone home to their manufacturers. You won't be aware these conversations are happening unless you're technically savvy and monitoring your router like we did. And even if you are, because the conversations are usually encrypted, you won't be able to see what your belongings are saying. When you buy a smart device, it doesn't just belong to you; you share custody with the company that made it.
That's not just a privacy concern. It also means that those companies can change the product you bought after you buy it. So your smart speaker can suddenly become the hub of a social network, and your fancy smart scale can have one of its key features taken away in a firmware update.
Usability was another aspect. She had no less than 14 different "apps" on her smartphone as well as several voice activated devices that still had comprehension difficulties.
(Score: 1, Troll) by r_a_trip on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:00PM (1 child)
How about people move their obese, McDonalds arses of the couch and go operate a mechanical switch. No spying and free exercise. Win/win.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Sunday February 11 2018, @08:41PM
How about "people", obese or otherwise, do whatever they want and ignore your input on the matter?
Mmm-hm. Let's concentrate on filling our lives with tasks that completely waste our time and energy, shall we, and just ignore the fact that there are really fun ways to exercise for free (a list "flipping light switches" rarely appears on, btw) and that the optimum way to deal with spying and theft by corporate and state and dark actors is not to live like it's 1930.
Here, in my old church, the main light switch is 60 feet away when we come in the front door, arms full of groceries or whatever. Now, I could have run a hundred bucks worth of Romex and put in a few more bucks worth of light switch hardware, but you know, it's actually less expensive (by more than half) and doesn't require one of us to drop whatever we're holding to just say "open the door" and "turn the lights on." A smart thermostat is very useful here as well, where the temperatures hit -40º every winter; it's nice to know if we need to rush home and deal with heating problems before there is a $10,000 water damage event from burst pipes – the thermostat fires off an email and we know the moment the interior temperature is below the hysteresis range we've set. It's also very handy to bring up the lights when we've paused the home theater before someone trips over a cat. And so on.
Yeah, we like living in the 2000's just fine, thanks.
In any case, while spying on our habits by corporations is (at least) despicable, that's not really the serious problem, in my view. The serious problem is the malware that is out to do damage and theft of resources / financial data, or compromise our legal positions.