Security Problems in Internet Cameras

Extremetech reports here on a report of a woman whose Internet camera was compromised, resulting in someone watching and talking to her.

Sonos Changes Its Privacy Policy

Extremetech reports here on changes by Sonos to the privacy policy for its wireless home audio devices.

FBI Warning on Internet-Enabled Toys

Toms Hardware reports here on an FBI public service announcement which warns of the dangers of Internet-enabled toys.

EU Draft Report on Privacy and Electronic Communication

The European Parliament has released here a draft report on a proposed regulation on privacy and electronic communication.  This report is long and technical, but it does describe at least encouraging a variety of measures to protect the privacy of electronic communications, such as enryption.  It also specifically mentions metadata as worthy of privacy protection.

This report probably is intended to cover email, social media, etc. But it does seem to me that much of the language is general enough to cover all sorts of other communications. Messages and data samples from IoT devices are, after all, electronic communications. The data and control packets on a distributed control bus are also electronic communications.

Commuication within and between IoT and CPS devices and systems deserve privacy.   A large body of work has shown that quite a bit can be inferred about a person and their activities from a small number of samples.  However, these systems often run in real time and under power constraints.  The encryption and privacy techniques appropriate to IoT and CPS are, in general, quite different from those for information technology (IT) systems.  Let's hope that privacy protections cover all the bases and do so in a manner appropriate to the wide ranging ways in which we use computers.

Android Apps Use Ultrasonic Monitoring

Extremetech reports here on a Germany research study which found that 234 Android apps use ultrasonic monitoring to track your activities.

Article on Spying by Consumer Electronics Devices

Extremetech reports here on a lawsuit which claims that Bose requires users of its wireless products to use software that spiess on the listening habits of its users.

WikiLeaks Release on Hacking

NBC News reports here on a release by WikiLeaks, which claims that the released document describe CIA hacking techniques.   According to the NBC News report, these techniques include a variety of techniques for hacking IoT and consumer electronics devices.

Article on TVs that Spy on Viewing Habits

Extremetech reports here on the extensive spying on viewing habits and system configuration characteristics performed by Vizio TVs.

A Great Tagline

See this article from Tom's Hardware: the founder of Kapersky refers to IoT as the "Internet of Threats."

More Stuipid Ideas in Consumer Electronics

Tom's Hardware reports that a new Barbie records your child's conversations with the doll and saves them in the cloud---here is the article.  Doesn't anyone in the consumer electronics industry know how to spell privacy?

Privacy and Security

Security is a big focus in personal, server, and embedded computing.  Computer security or cybersecurity broadly refers to all sorts of information security.  We often focus on malicious attacks but good computer security offers protection against natural events as well.

Privacy is a related but distinct issue.  Computer privacy refers to what others can find out about us.  This of course includes what we tell the world and what information about us the bad guys can steal from our computers.  But privacy also includes what can be inferred from our data.  In a lot of cases, our agreement to release one kind of data allows others to infer more about us.

A good cyber-physical example of the nature of privacy is offered by your electric meter.  Your electric utility reads your meter periodically to bill you for the electricity you use.  But those meter readings tell more about what you do.  With even sparse electricity readings, such as the typical monthly reading, an observer can estimate the number of people living in your house.  I have heard rumors that some authoritarian regimes use just this technique to find people hiding in homes.  With more frequent readings, an observer could tell when you are likely to be away from the house.  This is the cyber-physical equivalent of the old thieves' trick of driving by to find houses with no lights, then targeting those houses for burglaries.

As we install more cyber-physical systems and IoT devices, we will create new privacy problems for ourselves.  Some of these are variations on old-world privacy issues; other problems are relatively novel.  Hopefully, we can roll out these systems so that we don't create long-lasting privacy holes that society can't easily plug.