- Many home devices collect and share more data than necessary
- US and UK regulators are developing rules to protect device owners
- Researching devices and using them offline can help keep your data safe
Last month, which consumer body? It was revealed that many popular smart home devices, including air fryers, Unnecessary data may be being captured And shared with third parties – a fact you can easily miss when choosing and setting up a new device. Now, consumer rights regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom have laid out plans to force companies to be more transparent about what information they retain and how they use it.
as Gizmodo explained that the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) plans to issue new guidance to companies early next year specifically related to smart home technology and user privacy. According to ICOwhich “will outline the steps they need to take to comply with data protection laws and thereby protect clear expectations for people using smart products.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has propose new rules This would limit the ability of brokers to sell personal information that may have been obtained in a data breach. Under the proposed rules, these brokers would be treated like credit bureaus and background check companies and held to the same standards.
How to keep yourself (and your data) safe
This is promising news, but how do you know if your smart home device is safe to use now? Reading privacy policies thoroughly is an obvious first step, but some can be overly lengthy.
Home technology companion apps also have their own privacy policies, but keep in mind that just because a device has a companion app, or can connect to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, there’s usually no need to use its key features. For example, my electric toothbrush has an app that rewards you with badges if you brush your teeth for two minutes twice a day, but it works fine without the app. Likewise, some best air fryer There’s an app that lets you adjust the temperature remotely and provides recipe suggestions, but it’s not necessary for cooking fries.
If your device does need to be connected to the Internet, Mozilla Foundation Privacy Not Covered Report is a good starting point. The foundation’s researchers pored over the privacy policies of dozens of products, including home security cameras, smart thermostats and robot vacuums, to understand exactly how much data they collect, what their default privacy settings are and what your Who the data might be shared with and what happens if a company suffers a data breach.
For example, Garmin Index S2 The smart scale collects a lot of personal information (it’s its job, after all, to collect biometrics), but the company’s privacy policy is transparent, it won’t share or sell your data, and it has followed Mozilla’s previous recommendations to update Make it clear that all users have the right to have their data deleted, regardless of where they live.
Ecobee (manufacturer of one Ecobee smart thermostat) has also won praise for its SmartCamera home security device, which sends encrypted video footage directly to your phone without recording it. If you do choose to save any photos or clips, the company says they will be automatically deleted from its servers when you uninstall the app.
Make sure all connected devices are set up to receive automatic security updates so that any vulnerabilities discovered are patched as quickly as possible.
What’s the worst that could happen?
If your data is not properly protected, the results can be catastrophic. Just last week, Personal data from matchmaking sites Senior Dating It was discovered on the data breach website Have I Been Pwned that exposed sensitive data related to more than 700,000 people, including photos, email addresses and physical locations.
October, A driving training course in Brazil was found to have leaked sensitive data of 400,000 people Make the database unsafe. Photos, full names, addresses and government ID numbers are not secure, putting people at serious risk of identity theft and harassment.
When we review products at TechRadar, we always tell you whether a mobile app is available and what it’s actually used for, so you can make informed choices about what data you want to share.