In-brief: Two days after the site Wikileaks dumped thousands of pages of information about covert CIA hacking tool, the security and technology communities have weighed in. Their verdict? Meh.
Television
Viewing Data From Smart TVs Used to Push Ads to All Your Screens
In-brief: Electronics maker Vizio is the latest smart television brand caught harvesting the viewing habits of its customers and selling the data to advertisers, highlighting legal loopholes that connected devices are exploiting.
Realtors, OTA Publish Provisioning Checklist for Smart Homes
In-brief: smart homes aren’t just sold – they must also be ‘de-provisioned’ by the seller and ‘re-provisioned’ by the buyer. The National Association of Realtors and the Online Trust Alliance have a new checklist for doing so.
Gadgets That Spy On Their Owners
When the recent brouhaha erupted over Samsung SmartTV’s habit of harvesting ambient conversations and transmitting that data to unnamed third parties, we noted that Samsung was hardly alone. In fact, Security Ledger reported on identical behavior by LG television sets back in May, 2014. But, as this article notes, televisions aren’t the only sensor-rich devices that are seeing and hearing what goes on around us. Forget about Samsung or LG getting recordings of you laughing at The Daily Show, or foggy conversations you have about what to watch next. What about Microsoft Xbox Kinect, which includes sound, motion and infrared sensors that can track up to six individuals simultaneously? Also mentioned: Google Waze, Amazon Echo and GM’s OnStar. The question – as always- is about what privacy protections consumers should expect from connected devices. While all the above manufacturers sought “consent” from users in the text of verbose and legalistic Terms […]
