- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- nottheonion
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- nottheonion
- technology
“It could have been worse,” one owner incredibly concluded.
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Wait, this situation is way worse than what’s on the headline. These things (ecovac robot vaccums) have remotely accessible cameras? What in the Heebie Jeebus?
He opened the vacuum’s app to find a stranger was accessing its live camera feed and remote control feature, but assumed it might be an error.
On one hand, that’s pretty funny. But why would you allow the thing on the internet? No experience with robot vacuums, but don’t you just throw in on the floor? Set and forget?
It needs to communicate to the phone app somehow and anything else is going to be too big a hurdle for a huge portion of the customer base.
They would be within the same local wifi network. Or you could even use Bluetooth for a direct connection. There’s no reason for those things to connect to the internet, unless you want to update the firmware. Anything else is just a security and privacy risk.
Even to update firmware, your phone could download the blob from the servers and then send it to the device via Bluetooth.
I don’t think you’d even need the device itself to be connected to the internet for firmware. Your phone connects to the internet, gathers up the firmware, sends it to the device over BT. That’s how my helmet comms work.
If the device is connected to the local network and has some sort of maintenance UI then it might as well. I just don’t want it to be constantly connected or do it on its own.
Good point. But they market the ability to interact with the vacuum machine when you’re away from the house and it seems that this feature gains them more customers than they lose.
anything else is going to be too big a hurdle for a huge portion of the customer base.
That’s just a lie companies tell to try to excuse their theft of your data. They could make it work locally and be user-friendly at the same time if they wanted to, but they just don’t want to.
I don’t think it’s a lie to say that the majority of the customer base cares more about convenience and novelty than security of their vacuum.
They gotta harvest your data somehow
Unless and until companies are held truly accountable for releasing stuff with this bad of security baked in, we’re going to keep seeing this sort of story.
Michael Reeves did it first.
Precisely why I won’t use any of their camera robots. That, and Vacuum Wars said the Lidar performed better than the AI obstacle avoidance.
