How to stop your smart home spying on you - MW

In an interview with the BBC last year, Google's senior vice president of equipment and services, Rick Osterloh, thought about whether a homeowner should disclose the presence of smart home devices to Guests or not. I will, and do, when someone enters my home, he said.

When the central thermostat requires your phone number, your TV knows what you want to watch and hackers can install spyware in your home through a light bulb security hole, perhaps that's when we start to take home smart security seriously. Just this week, the National Cyber ​​Security Center issued a warning to owners of smart cameras and baby monitors to review their privacy settings.

You can get a quick overview of the privacy options for many smart home devices using Mozilla's privacy guides, not including instructions; However if you have invested in specific technology, all will not be lost. A few configuration adjustments can help you control when balancing the device's performance with data privacy (and they don't involve wearing anything like a ridiculous looking bracelet of a device). silence, jamming the microphone of a smart device, as recently presented by a team from the University of Chicago).

Is your smart TV watching when you watch telly?
When the FBI, more or less, warned users that their TVs could listen and watch them, it might be time to reflect on how stupid we are when it comes to smart TVs. Let's face it, most of us buy a big TV with all the programming and online streaming functions we can afford and go back to it. In addition to the initial adjustments at the stations and the ability to adjust the colors to our liking, a lot of configuration adjustments happen - it's a mistake that both privacy and security matters in image. TVs now connect to the internet, have web browsers, run applications and can be controlled by your voice; Automatic content recognition (ACR) sees what you see, from TV shows to games and results data that can be targeted to you for personalized advertising and viewing recommendations - often on different platforms. You can agree the ACR is used when you set up new telly. To disable it - although this varies from TV to TV - look for general or advanced settings and look for an option to view information about the data view of the user or the viewer. This will prevent some clever stuff on the network like suggestions and even some voice activated functions, working normally, so keep in mind that ACR data is anonymized before turning the switch off.

‘Smart surface threat reduction reduction
Smart speakers and digital assistants have many tricks; What they have in common is that, by necessity, they listen. Recent research shows that 59% of smart speaker users have privacy concerns, with unwanted listening and data collection at the front and center.

Of course, only you can determine if a Star Star Trek computer is voice-controlled in your home that goes beyond privacy concerns. However, it is possible to retain intelligent performance while minimizing the privacy of surface threats. To prevent an Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant account holder from seeing any requests you have made or questions you have asked, you can tell Alexa to delete what I just said and the Google assistant to remove it. My last chat. However, this requires account holders to enable the voice delete option in their settings. If you are an account holder, you can use Cameron's voice-matching functionality for Google Assistant to prevent your results from being available to anyone who only requests them. You can manage how Amazon uses your data by opening the Alexa app and heading to Settings | Alexa Privacy and change options help improve optional Amazon services along with messages used on YouTube to improve version settings. Google Assistant users can use the Home application via Settings | Other settings | Your data to pause collection of any voice recordings. However, Google warns that this may help limit or disable more personalized experiences on Google.

Ring the changes for your smart doorbell
A home security surveillance system requires video cameras to record what’s going on. When those security cameras are connected to, and accessible from, the internet, questions about who is watching the watcher come to the fore. When those connected cameras can be found in everything from your doorbell to the baby monitor in the nursery, privacy issues cannot be ignored. Amazon-owned Ring is perhaps most famous for its video doorbells and in the US Congress, Amazon is facing questions about the sharing of Ring data (including video footage) with more than 900 police departments.

Moreover, following investigations that found Ring had shared information with the likes of Facebook and Google, the company has said it doesn’t sell personal information to anyone and has suspended the use of most third-party analytics services in Ring apps while it works to provide greater ability to opt out in its new Control Center. This already lets users manage privacy and security options such as two-factor authentication, sharing information with third parties for personalised advertising, and managing any shared users. Clicking on the authorised client devices option will show all the devices that can access your Ring account, and therefore your videos. This will show the device and whether it’s logged into your account. To remove any you don’t recognise, remove all authorised client devices as one and then re-enrol them individually.

Is your central heating a threat to your privacy?

That we are even talking about privacy concerning your thermostat is, frankly, pretty nuts. But fears around central heating technology and privacy are a reality. In the case of the Google-owned Nest thermostat, however, those fears are ill founded. Despite some news reports to the contrary, your Nest thermostat has neither a camera nor a microphone inside. On the other hand, thermostats such as the Alexa-supporting ecobee4, do have microphones. The latter also has a privacy mode that can be activated once the thermostat is installed: tap the microphone icon at the bottom right of the thermostat screen and select voice control off. You won’t then be able to use Alexa to control the thermostat, but nor will it listen continuously for wake words or send recorded messages to Amazon. Both ecobee4 and Nest users can have all their personal information removed upon request, but this deletes their account and disables the remote access and “smart” connected functionality you bought the device for. A Nest thermostat will collect data such as your setup information, environmental data from its sensors, heating and cooling usage.

Shedding light on smart bulb security
Earlier this year, security researchers confirmed that a vulnerability could enable a hacker to launch an attack on your home computer network, and therefore your data, by way of a Philips Hue smart lightbulb. The vulnerability, without getting too technical, was actually in a low-power wireless protocol used to control many different Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices. Philips was quick to issue a new firmware update that fixed the problem before it was publicly disclosed. You can make sure your lightbulbs are protected by opening the Philips Hue app and heading to Settings | Software Update. This will alert you if an update is needed, but to prevent any further checking, you can enable the “automatic update” option on the same page.

MW