Smart Home Makers Hoard Your Data, But Won't Say If the Police Come For It (techcrunch.com) 45
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Thermostats know the temperature of your house, and smart cameras and sensors know when someone's walking around your home. Smart assistants know what you're asking for, and smart doorbells know who's coming and going. And thanks to the cloud, that data is available to you from anywhere -- you can check in on your pets from your phone or make sure your robot vacuum cleaned the house. Because the data is stored or accessible by the smart home tech makers, law enforcement and government agencies have increasingly sought out data from the companies to solve crimes. And device makers won't say if your smart home gadgets have been used to spy on you. We asked some of the most well-known smart home makers on the market if they plan on releasing a transparency report, or disclose the number of demands they receive for data from their smart home devices. For the most part, we received fairly dismal responses. Amazon did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokesperson for the company said last year that it would not reveal the figures for its Echo smart speakers. Facebook said that its transparency report section will include "any requests related to Portal," its new hardware screen with a camera and a microphone. A spokesperson for the company did not comment on if the company will break out the hardware figures separately. Google also declined to comment, but did point TechCruch to Nest's transparency report. Apple, the last of the big tech giants, said that there's no need to disclose its smart home figures because there would be nothing to report, adding that user requests made to HomePod are given a random identifier that cannot be tied to a person.
TechCrunch also asked a number of smaller smart home players, like August, iRobot, Arlo, Ring, Honeywell, Canary, Samsung, and Ecobee.
TechCrunch also asked a number of smaller smart home players, like August, iRobot, Arlo, Ring, Honeywell, Canary, Samsung, and Ecobee.
Data is the new oil. Haven't you heard? (Score:1)
We used to call this behavior "phoning home" and if a program so much as checked if there was an update available without giving you the option to turn that off, it was shunned. Now you don't even know how a filesystem works anymore and need everything to be in the cloud.
Re: Data is the new oil. Haven't you heard? (Score:4, Funny)
If you didn't want the insides of your home to become public property, you shouldn't have put it all out there to begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
I say it's my data.
That's why it's not in the cloud.
A funny coincidence, by the way, is that cloud is a homophone of "klaut", German for "he/she/it steals".
Spoiler alert! (Score:1)
This means the police already have all of everyone's data, all the time. They've been granted blanket access. Heads will literally roll before anyone in charge will admit it though. Enjoy.
Re: Spoiler alert! (Score:3)
We have become our own caricature of the Soviet Union.
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
OpenHab feels like a failure. I went there, click on "Get Started", There was no option to buy branded (or even proven compatible) hardware. It was all about downloading/installing/configuring the server. Which I would be willing to do if that happened after I got some hardware on the way...
Bottom-line, if OpenHab wants to succeed, it at least has to be more consumer friendly. Enough that I get a call from a relative who has a pile of hardware at their house; hardware ,they found and bought online I'm
Re: (Score:3)
Even without terms of service ... (Score:3)
if it comes packaged as a service and you access a website, portal, or online content to use it, then you dont own it. Read the terms of service ...
Even without terms of service that claim ownership of the data, when the data IS yours and nobody claims otherwise: If it's stored on an external service the supreme court has repeatedly ruled that that you have no "reasonable expectation of privacy".
Re: (Score:2)
The Supreme Court is shifting. As people move their "papers" into the cloud, it carries with it an expectation of privacy. People should not have to give up their 4th Amendment rights just to take advantage of modernity.
Not in my home (Score:1)
No "smart" shit in my home, ever.
Ummmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
"Thermostats know the temperature of your house, and smart cameras and sensors know when someone's walking around your home. Smart assistants know what you're asking for, and smart doorbells know who's coming and going. And thanks to the cloud, that data is available to you from anywhere"
Yes, and it's also available to the police, criminals, and anyone else who wants it bad enough.
This is exactly why all of my home automation gear (dated, but still working) is non-cloud, non-connected devices that are unable to call out or store stuff off site.
Re: (Score:2)
You should know that Qualcomm's upcoming chipset for 60GHz wireless networks will "support new 60GHz Wi-Fi Sensing applications like proximity and presence detection, gesture recognitions, room mapping with precise location and improved facial feature detection."
Well if they can sneak into my home and secretly retrofit all my gear to use that chip, then they deserve to be able to watch me fondle my wife, make breakfast, and leave pithy comments on Slashdot.
Literally nobody gives a shit. (Score:1)
A nightmare of total surveillance is already a fact and not one god damn fucking thing has done to stop it. You are all pathetic.
Build your own open solution (Score:4, Interesting)
This stuff is not rocket science, cheap easy to use controllers such as Pi and Micro:bit are out there now
https://www.raspberrypi.org/ [raspberrypi.org]
https://microbit.org/ [microbit.org]
https://www.eclipse.org/smarth... [eclipse.org]
Suuuuure (Score:3)
Now, they can be tied to an apple account, and that can be tied to a persons file* of course. Our ad revenue depends on it!
*File contains credit report, purchasing history, web browsing history, location history, people associated with, average economic class, political beliefs, employer, sexual orientation, medical conditions, hobbies, social graph, porn habits/strip club visits/any other possibly embarrassing leverage etc = you've got nothing to hide, right?!? It's ok if we have all of your personal info but you have none of ours, right?
Apple HomeKit (Score:2)
AFAIK Information about your devices is stored encrypted in the iCloud and can only be decrypted with the keychain. The keychain can only be decrypted by you, not by apple.
If you access actuators from outside the house, information is exchanged by sending e2e-encrypted iMessages to an iOS device in your house to relay to the device.
This all looks like a sound concept to me.
FISA? (Score:2)
"Google also declined to comment, but did point TechCruch to Nest's transparency report......etc....."
Doesn't a FISA warrant require the holder of the data not to release any specific information regarding the warrant, or even the existence of one? Basically it's not a company failure to guard privacy issue, it's a legal requirement. A failure of legislation is where the blame should be placed.
"Smart homes" are a surveillance boon (Score:2)
Your electric company may have already replaced your traditional meter with an electronic meter that monitors your energy consumption on a very fine-grained basis; the data from these meters is already being collected by the utilities. Researchers at UMass showed that they could determine what loads were being switched on and off inside a home with such a meter. Nest smoke detectors monitor "presence" information on a room-by-room basis and feed it up to the cloud. If you have cloud-based "smart home" de