This isn’t news to us and being online and very aware of the potential for security breaches every time we see stuff about the security of connected appliances we get a bit concerned as we think most people will reckon they’re good, it’s safe.
They’re not.
There’s a few issues we can see around connected appliances, aside the fact we think that they are an un-required expense and largely useless but that they may well be collecting and sharing data about you that you don’t want shared.
This week in the wake of IFA Berlin where the big guns are slugging out who has the best connected fridge Kaspersky labs have posted a warning over the security of these flashy new appliances.
“A fridge is no longer only a fridge, it’s now also a sensor collecting private information,” says Marco Preuss of Kaspersky. “Vendors need to say what data they collected, where it’s stored and who’s using it, and regulators need to work on standards and requirements to make companies more transparent about this. It’s the only way to bring consumer trust back.”
Now a lot of people might think that they need not care about this but, if you think about it and, we have just as Kaspersky clearly have do you really want your appliances sharing your personal information?
“Do you really want your health insurance provider to know if your fridge has only beer and chocolate in it?” Preuss said. “Vendors need to think about the privacy of such information. Not everything connected and gathering data is allowed to share it.”
What’s to stop the manufacturers of these products from selling that information to interest parties and making a bit on the side from it?
How many washes you do, what recipes you cook and so on are all up for grabs. Data that supermarkets, huge online retailers like Amazon and insurers would just love to get their hands on and, it may not be in your best interests for that to happen.
When Kaspersky asked German consumers in a survey 71 percent said they’re worried about internet companies collecting their personal data. Rightly so, it’s a problem.
Now couple that with companies that are banging out appliances in a world where the margins are wafer thin and they’re looking for ways to make a bit more, what do you think they will do if someone offers them cash for collected data?
That’s just one risk. A big one for sure and one that most people would never know was happening or where the companies that use it got the data but, what about direct attacks?
We’ve already seen Samsung fridge freezers getting hacked and poor support after only a few years. Who knows what the security will be like down the road, if there will even be any updates or patches.
Part of the issue we suspect is that the technology world moves at a blisteringly fast rate, the web and the hacks even faster. Appliance manufacturers largely have little or no experience of that and are dabbling in an area where the product replacement cycle is far longer so they can get left with a security hole at best or non-functioning features that people paid a lot of money to have after a relatively short time.
All reasons that we still maintain people should give connected appliances a very wide berth. At least for now as we reckon that the privacy and security of these products sucks, big time.
Seems that we’re not the only ones.
