- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
You might get some snarky comments, but the way I envision it is that the fuller of a picture companies can get of you (when you’re running a vacuum, when you’re driving, when your lights are on and off, etc.) the more data they have to try and run predictive analytics on your behavior and that can be used in a variety of ways that may or may not benefit you. At this point it’s mostly just to get you to buy things they think you’ll buy, but what happens when your profile starts to match up with someone who commits crimes? Maybe you get harassed by the authorities a little more often? Generally the lack of consent around how the data is collected and how it’s used is the problem most people have.
I’d dismiss this as fanciful ten years ago. But we’ve got ICE agents staking out grocery stores and flea markets looking for anyone passably “illegal”. Palantir seems to have made a trillion dollar business model out of promising an idiot president the ability to Minority Report crime. And then you’ve got the Israeli’s Lavendar AI and “Where’s Daddy” programs, intended to facilitate murdering suspects by bombing the households of relatives.
I guess it wouldn’t hurt to be a little bit more paranoid.