It’s an amazing modern world we live in. So many of our personal devices and appliances are connected to the internet, which is everywhere. Last year, our washing machine, an old-fashioned, non-connected, honest old washing machine, died. My wife wanted one like our daughter has, a combination washer and dryer in one unit, vent-free, controllable with her smartphone. She can start it, stop it, and change cycle settings, without being anywhere near the machine.
Last summer, I bought a new pickup, a 2022 Ford Super Duty, a machine I had lusted after lo these many years. The truck is completely computerized. It tells me, through an app on my phone, when it needs its oil changed, when it needs diesel exhaust fluid; I can check tire pressure, lock and unlock the doors, start the engine, and even pinpoint the truck’s location, all from my phone.
That’s the world we live in now, and it’s only going to become more connected as we go on. But it raises a concerning question: Who else are these machines talking to?
Now we learn that one man, investigating some oddities in his robot vacuum cleaner, made an alarming discovery.
In a post on his blog Small World, the computer programmer and electronics enthusiast Harishankar Narayanan detailed a startling find he made about his $300 smart vacuum: it was transmitting intimate data out of his home.
Narayanan had been letting his iLife A11 smart vacuum — a popular gadget that’s gained mainstream media coverage — do its thing for about a year, before he became curious about its inner workings.
“I’m a bit paranoid — the good kind of paranoid,” he wrote. “So, I decided to monitor its network traffic, as I would with any so-called smart device.” Within minutes, he discovered a “steady stream” of data being sent to servers “halfway across the world.”
“My robot vacuum was constantly communicating with its manufacturer, transmitting logs and telemetry that I had never consented to share,” Narayanan wrote. “That’s when I made my first mistake: I decided to stop it.”
I’m not a programmer nor an electronics enthusiast, so I never would have made this discovery. But were I aware of that communication, yes, I’d be looking to stop it; I can see no reason why it would be necessary for a vacuum cleaner to be transmitting information about one’s home to its manufacturer. What possible purpose could that serve?
But when Mr. Narayanan decided to disconnect his vacuum, it was shut down.
Through a process of trial and error, he was eventually able to connect to the vacuum’s system from his computer. That’s when he discovered a “bigger surprise.” The device was running Google Cartographer, an open-source program designed to create a 3D map of his home, data which the gadget was transmitting back to its parent company.
In addition, Narayanan says he uncovered a suspicious line of code broadcasted from the company to the vacuum, timestamped to the exact moment it stopped working. “Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.
“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”
To put it bluntly, when he shut off the flow of data, the manufacturer locked down his device.
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Now that’s downright unsettling.
I’ll grant you that a robot vacuum cleaner would have good reason to accumulate its own internal store of data about the rooms it is working in. That makes sense. But why should that data go anywhere beyond local storage? Of what possible use could it be to the manufacturer?
All this makes one look askance at any of these smart devices we have around. It’s not just our phones we have to worry about anymore. How much data is that smart-truck of mine gathering? Who might it be communicating with? I know it periodically downloads firmware updates from Ford through the cellular network; it tells me when it does this. It’s a safe bet our connected washer/dryer does as well.
What a dilemma! Most of us have little or no idea how to answer these questions. Harishankar Narayanan was able to learn of his vacuum’s extracurricular activities because he is capable in software and hardware. Most of us aren’t. I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how my smartphone actually works, or what data goes where; whenever I get a new one, I have to have one of my grandchildren show me how it works, because the manufacturers keep changing things.
It’s an amazing modern world we live in, yes. But it’s looking less and less private by the day.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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