So I saw a post last night that terrified me but then my app crashed before I could reblog it.
Smart appliances are completely, 100% reliant on wifi? Like if there's an outage or you couldn't pay your internet bill in time and your wifi isn't working, your stove/fridge/door locks etc are rendered completely and totally unusable? The oven doesn't revert back to a basic oven/stove that you just have to operate manually? It's competely inoperable? Is that what you're telling me because that's fucking terrifying. So you're either completely locked in or out of your home if wifi goes down? Who the fuck signs up for this shit?
I've read soooo many articles by people in the security industry who are like ALL of my locks at home are manual, always will be. They completely reject this 5G bullshit.
Also, Jesus, if Amazon is cooperating w the police vis-a-vis the doorbell camera bullshit, imagine how they'll cooperate with the police in 20 years by turning off your access to water because you getting shook down to for a donation to a local police charity.
P l e a s e stop with the internet of things. Your fridge doesn’t need to be connected to WiFi. Stop inviting unnecessary tools of surveillance into your home.
Listen, I am a Professional Security Person.
And if anyone even mentions any of this smart home bullshit near me I hiss like an offended cat.
A good old fashioned manual lock and deadbolt is the way to go, and I don’t trust my fridge to be talking to my doctor or my washing machine to have internet access, because I promise you that shit will go sideways immediately.
You know who can compromise your wifi enabled baby monitor or security cameras and watch the camera feed of your house? Literally anybody with 10 spare minutes and some freeware.
Imagine the possibilities of a hacking a WiFi-enabled gas-powered tankless water heater and telling it to open the valve without igniting the pilot light. This is how the revolution begins.
As someone who works in cloud technologies, it’s not the connection to the cloud that gives me nightmares. It’s the storage on the cloud.
Your rhoomba is a neat and efficient little machine because it stores all of its programmed paths on the cloud: every room it’s been in, the location of every piece of furniture, and most importantly, the hours it’s put to work. Enough data, and we have most (if not all) of your floorplan, the location of every major and minor piece of furniture, the occupants of your household, and a pretty good idea of your household’s usual routines.
Your cloud-connected thermostat tells us when you’re home, when you wake up and go to sleep, when you’re gone each day, and when you’re away for vacation. If that thermostat also has occupant-sensitivity (ie, turns itself down when no movement is detected), that’s a wonderful datapoint for tracking your routine. And if the thermostat ‘learns’ your patterns enough to make suggestions, that’s because it’s stored everything in the cloud -- along with a million other peoples’ data -- to statistically infer your behavior.
Your fridge can suggest recipes for the food you’ve stored, which means it’s sending a query into the cloud with the contents of your current fridge. If it’s predictive -- such as, telling you what you normally eat and suggesting a grocery list to resupply -- that means it’s also tracking what you eat, how often, how fast, and when you do most of your shopping.
With your address, I can get publicly-available data on how much you paid for the house, its age, and its rough square footage. With the rhoomba, I can guess you go out and do things on your days off, that you have at least two animals, that you have a child of walking age, an eat-in kitchen and a formal dining room, hardwood floors, and at least three rugs of high enough quality that you’ve programmed the rhoomba to avoid munching on the rugs’ tassels. The thermostat tells me you’re early to bed and early to rise, that you keep the house relatively cold during hot summers and that your HVAC sometimes struggles to keep up. Your fridge tells me how much you spend, your entertainment patterns, and a fairly good idea of your tastes.
I now know when, where, what, and how to hit you with advertisements for holiday entertaining, high-end furniture, home remodeling, appliance replacement -- and a fairly well-educated guess on your budget for each. There’s a billion other things I could see, deduce, and use from your collected data. Not every use would be as innocuous as advertisements, either.
And yes, your collected data is available for purchase by corporations beyond the one who made a single appliance. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Remember, Target was able to use its customer data to set up a predictive system that identified pregnant women before the women were even aware themselves --- and that was just sales data. Imagine what Target, and all its corporate brethren, can learn about you now that you’ve basically put your entire private life on the cloud, right there for the taking.
And so we return to my favourite quote from my dissertation:
"We know where you are, we know where you've been, we can more or less know what you're thinking about" - Eric Schmidt when he was CEO of Google discussing the value of data and data analytics.
