Say Goodbye to Privacy at Home with Smart Devices

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Say Goodbye to Privacy at Home with Smart Devices

You might have already heard the controversial plans of Roomba makers of mapping homes with their smart vacuum cleaner and selling the information to third parties. Many other appliance manufacturers are planning a similar strategy, according to private investigators in Russia.

Smart devices have become an excuse to collect data. Manufacturing and selling a device is not a good business anymore given that there are way too many people who can just copy and sell a similar device for a just a fraction of the price. China is the best example. This has led manufacturing companies to rethink their strategies and to try to move on to the business of the moment: trading data. But to be able to sell data, they first need to collect it, and it must be valuable to make a good profit.

Roomba is not the only company, nor the first, to be in the turmoil for privacy concerns. Amazon Echo smart speakers were proved to be listening and recording everything going on around them in a recent murder case. And although the information for this particular case was useful, it certainly is not nice to have a device spying on you all the time. Jeff Bezos may be able to control the news with his Washington Post newspaper and team of reporters, but time will tell if he can control consumers and their fight for privacy. So far, corporations are winning and privacy is losing.

Can you imagine having a device that alerts sellers every time you mention their brand or their competitors in your private home conversations? Or one that scans your cabinets to see if you are out of anything they want to sell to you? We often picture these situations as harmless, why wouldn’t you want to be alerted when you´re almost out of milk? Sure it would be convenient! But the problem is that companies have no limits as to what is appropriate to collect and what is not.

Recently, alerts have been issued to parents of children who own smart toys because their microphones and cameras were being used to collect data about kids’ whereabouts. But it doesn’t take a fancy toy to do that, since most smartphone apps collect all kinds of data using the GPS and camera functions even if they do not need those to run the app. No matter what the intentions are, the companies retrieving this information are putting at risk the most vulnerable population of all.

Unfortunately, there is no stopping manufacturers from taking privacy invasion steps. Private investigators recommend trying to keep these kind of smart appliances, devices and toys away from your home as long as possible if you want to preserve your home as your only left private space. Always disable your GPS and check your privacy settings! With Russian online gangs and with advertisers sticking their noses into our business, and Google following us around the internet and recording our searches (and selling that information to advertisers). Where will it end?

Private investigators say protecting your privacy is key to keeping you and your family safe.