“Phoning Home” | Privacy Ratings | Cars | TVs
Printers | Virtual Assistants | Airtags | The Ring
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Not that many years ago, most of your devices were dumb. They did what they were designed to do without reporting the frequency of use and what you were using them for to their manufacturers.
Following the widespread adoption of the public Internet combined with the development of cellular networks (smartphones) and the Internet of Things (IoT), manufacturers realized that they could profit from the great surveillance economy.
There are already more connected devices than people in the world and the proliferation of “smart” devices has just begun.
Everything is being connected — TVs, printers, virtual assistants, smart cars, power meters and more — the majority in a very insecure manner that can be hacked.
While you may marvel at the potential for your fridge to automatically order items running low, that data is extremely valuable to your local supermarket.
While this connectivity was sold to the public for its features and convenience, permission to collect data was added discretely into privacy policies.
Virtually every “smart” device is gathering information on you (often including your private conversations).
The potential for both improving other smart products and advertising opportunities are strong motives to find a way around consumer privacy concerns.
The difference between a smartwatch and an ankle monitor is, in many ways, a matter of context: Who wears one for purported betterment, and who wears one because they are having state power enacted against them?Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of surveillance technologies—even ones that offer supposed benefits—creates an environment where even more surveillance is deemed acceptable. After all, there are already cameras and microphones everywhere.
— The Atlantic
During an interview with Reuters, the CEO of iRobot, the company which manufactured Roomba device, has revealed that the robotic vacuum cleaner also builds a map of your home while cleaning — and is now planning to sell this data to third-party companies.
— The Hacker News
Since that concern was first addressed in 2017, the company has changed its privacy policy.
Analogue meters simply recorded the total amount of electricity used between readings.
Smart meters do more than simply remove the need for meter readers to visit your home or business a few times a year.
They record the time of day, duration and quantity of electricity you use — needed for time-of-day billing rates.
Like any collected data, it reveals much about you, including highly marketable data while using technology with significant health risks.
Privacy information begins at the video's 24:27 mark but I strongly recommend watching the entire presentation.
Your router is the gateway to the Internet. Every connected device in your home or office runs its data through that device.
Such information would be extremely valuable for marketing and profiling purposes but many privacy policies are not specific enough to tell you what is collected or how it is shared.
Wi-Fi router companies say they don't track the websites you visit, but all of them collect and share some user data.
— CNET
Since the router was set up at the beginning of December, there hasn't been a single hour of complete silence from it, even when there was no one in the house.
— The House That Spied on Me
Any bed that monitors your heart rate, breathing, and movement could allow people with access to that data to determine when you get up in the morning, when you go to bed at night, or even when and how often you have sex.
— Mozilla
The reason I smartened up my house was to find out whether it would betray me.I soon discovered that the only thing worse than getting a bad night's sleep is to subsequently get a report from my bed telling me I got a low score and “missed my sleep goal.”
The fantasy of the smart home is that it will save us time and effort, but the friction involved in getting various devices from different companies to work together meant that many things took longer to do.
— The House That Spied on Me
Most of the IoT devices have been developed with the priority on connection and little or no attention to privacy or security. Retrofiting these devices will be nearly impossible &mdash it is cheaper to replace them than it is to secure them.
Wanting to be able to turn on a few lights if I was late coming home, I purchased a couple of “smart” plugs. I quickly returned them when I found out they wanted me to downgrade my router's security to obsolete protocols.
Smart security cameras and smart assistants are, in the end, cameras and microphones in your home that collect video and audio information about your presence and activities.
— The Conversation
Smart devices collect a wide range of data about their users.But even limiting access to personal data to automated decision making systems can have unwanted consequences.
Any private data that is shared over the internet could be vulnerable to hackers anywhere in the world, and few consumer internet-connected devices are very secure.
— The Conversation
Mozilla's Consumer Creep-O-Meter ranks the state of consumer privacy in the U.S. In 2023 it ranks very creepy.
Many products automatically opt you into data collection and sharing. But if you poke around in the settings, you can often scale back what's being collected and shared. You can also opt to disable features like Amazon Alexa, further minimizing data collection.
See if the products you use abuse your privacy.
Can anyone really have total confidence in what these machines overhear and where those recordings might appear? Sometimes, such speakers have deliberately recorded your conversations. To help create a better product for you, of course.
— ZDNET
The problem of privacy is only going to get worse as the Internet of Things evolves.
Mozilla's PrivacyNotIncluded calls cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy.
Car makers have been bragging about their cars being "computers on wheels" for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants' privacy hasn't really caught up.Machines that, because of all those brag-worthy bells and whistles, have an unmatched power to watch, listen, and collect information about what you do and where you go in your car.
— Mozilla
Cars are no longer dumb machines -- They're smart devices with hundreds of computers bolted on top that collect information about our activities. Some car companies have even explicitly said in their privacy policies that they collect information about your sexual activity!
— Naomi Brockwell
Vehicles today collect reams of data about drivers, their contacts and where they've been. In the old days that data might have been just about engine trouble. Now it could be GPS, your contact list, and who uses the vehicle.The data generated by cars will be worth as much as $750 billion by 2030, according to global management consultants McKinsey.
— CAA
As early as 2015 reports revealed that Samsung televisions were eavesdropping on their owners, protected by one sentence in Samsung's 1500-word privacy policy.
In 2017 Vizio surrendered to a lawsuit charging them with collection viewing data on 11 million consumer TVs.
Smart TVs collect a massive amount of data on viewers to share with advertisers, including the programs people watch. Unlike older analog devices, the new internet-enabled TVs also can "crash" and require scanning for viruses, just like a computer.Users should understand the features on their smart TVs, the FBI advised, including how to disable them if the need arises. The bureau also recommended changing passwords or even taping over the camera when the television is not in use.
— CBS News
This now appears to affect most brands of smart TVs, especially where there appears to be exceptional value.
But the story of cheap TVs is not entirely just market forces doing their thing. Perhaps the biggest reason TVs have gotten so much cheaper than other products is that your TV is watching you and profiting off the data it collects.The companies that manufacture televisions call this “post-purchase monetization,” and it means they can sell TVs almost at cost and still make money over the long term by sharing viewing data.
In addition to selling your viewing information to advertisers, smart TVs also show ads in the interface.
— The Atlantic
Many people feel safe with a printed document, assuming it can't be traced.
The US government made a secret deal to place yellow dots onto every page printed from many (perhaps most) colour laser printers, ostensibly to track counterfeiters.
We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer.
— Electronic Frontier Foundation
Virtual assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant) cannot do their job without personal information, but you should be concerned about how else this data is used.
Manufacturers typically promise that only automated decision-making systems and not humans see your data. But this isn't always the case.For example, Amazon workers listen to some conversations with Alexa, transcribe them and annotate them, before feeding them into automated decision-making systems.
— The Conversation
These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior.Stripped of their gloss, these devices are similar to the ankle monitors and surveillance apps such as SmartLINK that are forced on people on parole or immigrants awaiting hearings.
— The Atlantic
Amazon was fined $25 million for violating child privacy law.
Parents could request deletion of the data, but the FTC found Amazon continued to retain transcripts of what children said regardless of the request.Amazon explained it kept the voice recordings of children to "help it respond to voice commands, allow parents to review them, and to improve Alexa's speech recognition and processing capabilities."
The FTC believes Amazon was simply "benefitting its bottom line at the expense of children's privacy."
— PCMag
Amazon was also fined $5.8 million for spying on customers through their Ring cameras.
Apple Airtags are very small tracking devices that you can attach to items like your purse, your keys, etc. so you can find them. It works on the same principle as Find My Phone.
Airtags track things out of normal Bluetooth range by being part of Apple's huge network of phones.
The problem is, they can also be used to surreptitiously track non-consenting people. This is personal surveillance on a scale never before possible.
As a Bluetooth tracker, AirTags are extremely accurate in terms of location tracking, but that's also their downfall. Safety alerts or not, I shouldn't be able to track anyone or anything beyond Bluetooth range.
— Cashable
While Airtags only work with Apple devices (an Android app is planned), The Tile is a similar third-party product that can be tracked on iOS, Android and Windows devices or by using Amazon's Sidewalk.
If you've seen the commercials for the Amazon Ring camera, you'd think crime was rampant in your neighbourhood.
By sending photos and alerts every time the camera detects motion or someone rings the doorbell, the app can create an illusion of a household under siege. It turns what seems like a perfectly safe neighborhood into a source of anxiety and fear.
— EFF
The Ring is a door bell/video camera that allows you to see who is at your door even when away from home. Sounds like a great security tool, right?
The commercials are intended to increase your anxiety to sell devices. Crime rates have been dropping for years. Instead, Amazon was creating a network of video cameras used by police everywhere without obtaining a warrant.
Ring owners can share video from their Ring's camera with other Ring owners as well as provide that footage to local police without a warrant. Even if you don't have a Ring, your neighbour's Ring shows everything going on at your house.
Amazon was fined $5.8 million for spying on customers through their Ring cameras.
An FTC investigation concluded that Ring, which Amazon acquired in 2018, had compromised the privacy of its customers "by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers' private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections."The FTC found that one Ring employee had viewed thousands of videos of female customers in their bedrooms and bathrooms over several months.
— PCMag
Fortunately, warrantless access will no longer be supported by Ring.
This announcement will also not stop police from trying to get Ring footage directly from device owners without a warrant. Ring users should also know that when police knock on their door, they have the right to — and should — request that police get a warrant before handing over footage.
— EFF
Gizmodo calls Ring a “quasi-surveillance network” that has exposed users' real-world locations in the past and questions the safety of Amazon Sidewalk.
The basic security features are no longer free, costing CAD $5.99/month or CAD $59.99/year. Plus plans cost CAD $15/month or CAD $150/year.
[C]ustomers who buy a Ring Alarm on or after March 29 [2023] must have a Ring Protect subscription for various features that were previously free. Those that already own a Ring Alarm system or who buy one before March 29 are unaffected and will have access to the features without a subscription "for the expected life of the device."Features that are being paywalled include real-time app and email notifications, the ability to connect cameras and doorbells to the Alarm system, and 60 days of Alarm event history. Free users will now get just 24 hours of event history.
— PCMag
Issues with facial recognition complicates matters. It isn't as straight forward as TV crime dramas would have you believe.
[E]ven when facial recognition works as expected, it's often used to surveil people of color. Amazon's Ring doorbell cameras pose similar risks, because Ring shares its footage with law enforcement through its Neighbors Law Enforcement Portal, which has been called the "perfect storm of privacy threats." — Mozilla
Many local police departments have been working with Amazon to increase the number of cameras to gain access to footage. But there are issues.
In just a year and a half, Amazon's Ring has set up more than 500 partnerships with law enforcement agencies to convince communities to spy on themselves through doorbell cameras and its social app, Neighbors.The company is moving recklessly fast with little regard for the long-term risks of this mass surveillance technology. These partnerships threaten free speech and the well-being of communities, vastly expand police surveillance, undermine trust between police and residents, and enable racial profiling by exacerbating suspicion and paranoia.
— EFF
Law enforcement partnerships with @ring don't make neighborhoods safer—they turn our front doors into vast, unaccountable surveillance networks.
— EFF on Twitter
Amazon Sidewalk is an opt-out feature for Amazon devices (e.g., The Ring or Alexa). Starting June 8, 2021, devices are automatically enrolled.
[O]dds are good most people purchasing Amazon gear will have no idea what Sidewalk is, nor stumble across it in their device's options and disable it.
— Lifehacker
— Mozilla
- Open your Alexa app (if you have a Ring, but not an Alexa, go to your Ring Control Center in the app to opt-out).
- Open More. Open Settings.
- Select Account Settings.
- Select Amazon Sidewalk.
- Turn Amazon Sidewalk to OFF.
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Updated: August 19, 2024