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posted by mrpg on Sunday February 11 2018, @08:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the telescreen-2018 dept.

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.

The House That Spied on Me


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 12 2018, @01:44AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 12 2018, @01:44AM (#636525) Journal

    Seriously, if there was a market for this, don't you think it would be a lot more obvious by now?

    You mean the deluge of spam in email and regular mail isn't enough to tip you off?

    I look around at the things I have purchased in the last three years, and I don't see anything that I spent any money on which were directly marketed to me. I tend to do a lot of searching on the web for product evaluation before making a decision, and often just walk away refusing to buy any of them.

    You aren't the entire world. A lot of people don't take that level of care.