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
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:
- Your TV (obviously)
- Your Cable Box
- Your Dishwasher, Clothes Dryer, Toaster, Clock Radio and Remote Control
- Your Lights
- Your Heat and Air Conditioning
- Security Alarms
- Insulin Pumps and Pacemakers
- Smartphones
- Your Tablet and Computer
(They obviously miscounted, but still.)