With the NSA spying revelation and other recent events... this article gives you pause to do some serious thinking about what we buy and use without really giving much thought to what others COULD do with them....


Living in a World Where Your Appliances Spy on You

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Melissa Melton
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Imagine this happened to you.
You are fast asleep in the middle of the night, when suddenly you hear the voice of a strange man talking to your baby daughter… from inside her room.
You jump up and rush in there to find that, other than your infant sleeping in her crib, no one is there.
Then you hear him again, screaming, “Wake up, baby! Wake up!”
You focus on the source of the sound — your WI-FI baby monitor camera, which suddenly turns its lens on you without your prompt, so whoever has hacked it can scream obscenities at you in your own home in the middle of the night.
That's what happened to one Cincinnati, Ohio couple just last week according to WBTV FOX19:

“Someone had hacked in from outside,” Heather said.
So how many other times had someone hacked into their camera and watched their baby through their Foscam IP Camera.
“You do kind of feel violated in a way,” Adam said.
According to tech experts, wireless IP cameras like the one the Shrieks have are an easy way for hackers to open a cyber door directly into your home.
“Any kind of Internet-connected device essentially could be subjected to this,” said Dave Hatter, a solutions expert for Infinity Partners.
And experts say once they get inside the camera in your home, hackers may also be able to get inside your lives.

They go on to recommend changing your password and making sure your software is up-to-date, but that's it? Is that really going to make these parents feel safer about having a WI-FI, smartphone camera trained on their daughter?
The takeaway is, if you can use it to spy on your child, it can be used to spy on you. The same goes with all this “smart” technology.
And if you think it's just hackers randomly spying on people this way here and there, think again. It's corporations. It's the government. It's the government in consort with corporations.
Last fall, LG Electronics was caught sending data about its customers viewing habits on several of its “smart TV” models to a company in South Korea — even after one customer changed his privacy setting to “off,” supposedly disabling the TVs ability for “collection of watching info” in the options menu (it is a creepy enough sign of the times that this “option” comes standard anyway).
The company later released an apology statement.
ABC News also released a list of the nine household appliances that might be spying on you: on your habits, on your usage, on the minutia of your daily life:

1. Your TV (obviously)
2. Your Cable Box
3. Your Dishwasher, Clothes Dryer, Toaster, Clock Radio and Remote Control
4. Your Lights
5. Your Heat and Air Conditioning
6. Security Alarms
7. Insulin Pumps and Pacemakers
8. Smartphones
9. Your Tablet and Computer

(They obviously miscounted, but still.)

And Back to the Future promised us hover boards…
Last Spring Wired reported that former CIA Director David Patraeus could hardly wait to spy on people through their appliances when he was discussing how this is all a part of the coming “Internet of Things” — a future where everything is technologically connected to everything else:

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”
Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.

Why do you think the NSA built a $3 billion data hub in the Utah desert?
We are living in an era of Big Data. It was a big talking point at last year's Bilderberg Conference, after all. Periodicals like MIT Technology Review pose the question “Has Big Data Made Anonymity Impossible?,” which is essentially telling you we live in a ubiquitously monitored information age, so you might as well get used to it Jack.
With the smart grid being raised all around us, life is only going to get more tracked, more traced, more analyzed…and a lot less…private.
How much do you value your privacy these days? Do younger generations even know what privacy truly is anymore?
Well, in the new smart grid we're all being assimilated into, you really aren't meant to have any.
Our Brave New World will start in the now forthcoming brave new cities. Take a look at your “smart” future:


Melissa Melton is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple and a co-creator of Truthstream Media. Wake the flock up!
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Friends of ours have an Xbox Kinect...it knows each of them when they use it...when it's on, it knows who they are if they are near it. They said I should get one. No thanks...I have no need for a gaming system to automatically recognize me....think of what that could be used for.

Exactly... I've reconsidered several items since the NSA spying incident... some of the cases mentioned in this article I didn't even know happened from the news... but the potiential is there... and I knew that from issues with laptops and webcams...

If someone got one of those internet connected Thermostats, Tossing the NEST out there as just one example of the many... who issues upgrades if a hack is discovered, what if firmware isn't upgradable... how would they find much less inform everyone who bought one... who would be responsible?

I went to College to get my Electronic Engineering degree because I was a technology geek before the term HI TECH INDUSTRY was even coined.

And as much fun and how useful these can be....there is the dark flipside of how they can be unknowingly used against us.

I like technology but it scares me at the same time. Really, I don't think we need to be this advanced. The early to mid 90's was pretty good. I wouldn't mind being back in the day of the beeper rather than the cell phone.

Smoothy, you're my age if not a little younger. The entire concept of privacy was negated when they started those "fill in the box completely" answer sheets. Yes, data miners are getting better at it. Your only option is to go Dennis Weaver and buy some land from the BLM and go off the grid.

Someone hacking into a baby monitor represents a major issue. But smart appliances can be a boon.

I would love a refrigerator that I can scan an item as I finish so that it keeps a household inventory and prints an shopping list when I get low.

But most of all, I want a clothes dryer that automatically pairs my socks or can at least tell me where the missing single socks are ;)

Get used to the idea because after the recent scare in Canada when 900 or so SIN numbers were stolen by an IT student out west, we have been advised that having PIN numbers may not be the ideal choice now.

Suggestions are thumb prints, or voice recognition, either one is good and there are several more foolproof systems.

We have this technology, and if it saves my money from hackers, I will probably consider what they have to offer in the way of security other then PIN numbers.

I think technology is a wonderful thing in the right hands. But most people have no clue as to how far into our lives they want to encroach. As for myself I dont even own a cellphone.

THe NEST thermostat learns your occupancy habits because it senses when people walk past it... it profiles you over weekly periods and determines when you are always out of the house and how long, like out of town or vacation...to adjust your heating and cooling system...its WiFi accessible and tracks this info over long periods, consider that just one example of how that can be used against you in some very bad ways. Like the safest times to rob your house....

And your home network is only as secure as its least secure link....which might not be your computer.

Yahoo ,Google ,and Facebook should realize that after I purchase an item on Amazon that it's pointless to advertise that item to me.

My washer has been acting a bit suspicious lately. And my dryer I never did trust. I think they are plotting against me. Good to know its just some hacker.

You need to be careful with those washing machines... they turn you in for excessive skid mark violations. Ever wonder why you get so many online avertisements for toiletry products?

now what I want is appliances that can monitor my blood pressure, add up the calories in my food purchases, decide the menu for today, make and serve the food and do the cleanup as well, all without my help. For those of you who can afford personal servants and significant others, bon voyage, I will continue not to trust appliances or allow them to connect to the net