“It could have been worse,” one owner incredibly concluded.
Wait, this situation is way worse than what’s on the headline. These things (ecovac robot vaccums) have remotely accessible cameras? What in the Heebie Jeebus?
He opened the vacuum’s app to find a stranger was accessing its live camera feed and remote control feature, but assumed it might be an error.
Yeah, surely it’s an “error” and not yet another company not being able or caring to do shit all about basic security because they apparently don’t have to and no one cares 👍
Yeah so we were visiting friends in Germany and the father was all proud to show us how he surveiled the (young adult) children and their friends with the vacuum camera while they were out.
Needless to say that was super creepy and for sure we thought our room might be ‘bugged’ so we didn’t talk about it until we were (far, far) away.
lol, holy hell… I am extremely against generalizing and stereotyping any group of people, particularly for things they couldn’t control (country of birth), but it did give me a chuckle that it would be Germans bragging about something like that. Sorry!
That’s just wild, because I’m pretty sure it would be illegal in a lot of jurisdictions. Especially involving minors. Holy Moly.
TBF he was born and raised in East Germany and they’ve…got different values and outlooks.
He also placed a mic pickup and speakers around his van so that everyone can hear what he says without him raising his voice…it was pretty off putting.
We visited them about 10 years ago and he wasn’t this…odd.
Haha, that sounds wild about the mic and speakers!
On one hand, that’s pretty funny. But why would you allow the thing on the internet? No experience with robot vacuums, but don’t you just throw in on the floor? Set and forget?
They gotta harvest your data somehow
It needs to communicate to the phone app somehow and anything else is going to be too big a hurdle for a huge portion of the customer base.
They would be within the same local wifi network. Or you could even use Bluetooth for a direct connection. There’s no reason for those things to connect to the internet, unless you want to update the firmware. Anything else is just a security and privacy risk.
Even to update firmware, your phone could download the blob from the servers and then send it to the device via Bluetooth.
I don’t think you’d even need the device itself to be connected to the internet for firmware. Your phone connects to the internet, gathers up the firmware, sends it to the device over BT. That’s how my helmet comms work.
If the device is connected to the local network and has some sort of maintenance UI then it might as well. I just don’t want it to be constantly connected or do it on its own.
Good point. But they market the ability to interact with the vacuum machine when you’re away from the house and it seems that this feature gains them more customers than they lose.
anything else is going to be too big a hurdle for a huge portion of the customer base.
That’s just a lie companies tell to try to excuse their theft of your data. They could make it work locally and be user-friendly at the same time if they wanted to, but they just don’t want to.
I don’t think it’s a lie to say that the majority of the customer base cares more about convenience and novelty than security of their vacuum.
Unless and until companies are held truly accountable for releasing stuff with this bad of security baked in, we’re going to keep seeing this sort of story.
Michael Reeves did it first.
Precisely why I won’t use any of their camera robots. That, and Vacuum Wars said the Lidar performed better than the AI obstacle avoidance.
