Your air fryer may share your private information. Here’s how you can protect yourself now
- Many home devices collect and share more data than necessary
- US and British watchdogs are setting rules to protect device owners
- Examining devices and using them offline can help keep data safe
Last month, consumer organization Which? revealed that many popular smart home devices, including air fryers, may be collecting unnecessary data and sharing it with third parties – facts you could easily overlook when choosing and setting up a new device. Now consumer rights watchdogs in the US and Britain have outlined plans to force companies to be more transparent about what information they hold and how it is used.
If Gizmodo explains that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in Britain plans to issue new guidelines for companies early next year, specifically related to smart home technology and user privacy. According to the ICOThis will “set clear expectations about what they need to do to comply with data protection laws and, in turn, protect people using smart products.”
In the US, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has now done this proposed a new rule that would limit brokers’ ability to sell personal information that may have been obtained in data breaches. Under the proposed rule, these brokers would be treated like credit bureaus and background check companies and subject to the same standards.
How to keep yourself (and your data) safe
This is promising news, but how can you determine if a smart home device is safe to use? Reading the privacy policy thoroughly is the obvious first step, but some can take prohibitively long time.
Companion apps for home use also have their own privacy policies, but keep in mind that just because a device has a companion app or can be connected to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, it’s often not necessary to use its main features. For example, my electric toothbrush has an app that gives you badges if you brush your teeth for two minutes twice a day, but it works fine without that. Likewise, some of the best air fryers have an app that lets you adjust the temperature remotely and provide recipe ideas, but it’s not mandatory for cooking your fries.
If your device needs to be online, the Mozilla Foundation’s Privacy Not Included 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 vacuum cleaners, to find out exactly how much data they collect, what their default privacy settings are, and with whom your data might be shared. with, and what can happen if the company experiences a data breach.
For example, the Garmin Index S2 smart scale collects a lot of personal information (collecting biometric data is its job, after all), but the company’s privacy policy is transparent, doesn’t share or sell your data, and has acted on previous advice from Mozilla to make it clearer that all users have the right to delete their data, regardless of where they live.
Ecobee (maker of one of the Ecobee SmartThermostats) also received praise for its SmartCamera home security device, which sends encrypted video directly to your phone without being recorded. If you choose to save 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 to receive automatic security updates so that any discovered vulnerabilities are patched as quickly as possible.
What’s the worst that can happen?
If your data is not properly protected, the consequences can be devastating. Just last week, personal data from the matchmaking site Senior Dating was discovered on the data breach site Have I Been Pwned, exposing sensitive data of more than 700,000 people, including photos, email addresses and physical locations.
In October, a Brazilian driving school was found to have exposed the sensitive data of 400,000 people by leaving a database unsecured. Photos, full names, addresses, and government ID numbers were all left unsecured, putting people at serious risk of identity theft and harassment.
When we review a product here at Ny Breaking, we always let you know if there’s a mobile app available and what it actually does, so you can make an informed choice about what data you share.