We live in an incredible modern world. Many of our personal devices and devices are connected to the Internet, which is everywhere. Last year our washing machine, an old, outdated, unconnected, honest-to-goodness washing machine, died. My wife wanted one like our daughter did, a washer and dryer combined in one unit, ventless, controllable with her smartphone. She can start it, stop it and modify the cycle parameters, without being near the machine.
Last summer I purchased a new pickup, a 2022 Ford Super Duty, a machine I had lusted after for so many years. The truck is fully computerized. It tells me, via an app on my phone, when it needs an oil change, when it needs diesel exhaust fluid; I can check tire pressure, lock and unlock doors, start the engine, and even locate the truck, all from my phone.
This is the world we live in now, and it will only become more connected as we move forward. But this raises a worrying question: Who else are these machines talking to?
Now we learn that a man, investigating some quirks of his robot vacuum cleaner, has made an alarming discovery.
In an article on his blog Small worldcomputer programmer and electronics enthusiast Harishankar Narayanan has detailed a surprising discovery he made about his $300 smart vacuum cleaner: It was transmitting intimate data outside of his home.
Narayanan had been letting his iLife A11 smart vacuum cleaner – a popular gadget that has gained mainstream media coverage – do its thing for about a year, before becoming curious about its inner workings.
“I’m a little 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 “constant stream” of data being sent to servers “on the other side of the world.”
“My robot vacuum was constantly communicating with its manufacturer, transmitting logs and telemetry data that I never agreed to share,” Narayanan wrote. “That’s when I made my first mistake: I decided to quit.”
I’m neither a programmer nor an electronics enthusiast, so I would never have made this discovery. But if I knew about this communication, yes, I would seek to stop it; I see no reason why it would be necessary for a vacuum cleaner to transmit information about your house to its manufacturer. What could this be used for?
But when Mr. Narayanan decided to unplug his vacuum cleaner, it stopped.
Through a process of trial and error, he was eventually able to log into the vacuum 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 one’s home, data that the gadget transmitted to its parent company.
Additionally, Narayanan claims to have discovered a suspicious line of code released by the company to the void, time-stamped at the exact moment it stopped working. “Someone – or something – had remotely issued a kill order,” he wrote.
“I undid the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t just built in a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”
To put it bluntly, when it cut off the data flow, the manufacturer locked its device.
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It’s downright destabilizing.
I grant you that a robot vacuum cleaner would have good reason to accumulate its own internal storage of data on the rooms in which it works. It makes sense. But why should this data go beyond local storage? How useful could this be to the manufacturer?
All this makes us look askance at any of these smart devices we have around. It’s not just our phones we need to worry about anymore. How much data does my smart truck collect? Who could he communicate with? I know it periodically downloads firmware updates from Ford over the cellular network; he tells me when he does that. It’s a safe bet that our connected washer/dryer does it too.
What a dilemma! Most of us have little or no idea how to answer these questions. Harishankar Narayanan was able to learn about his vacuum’s extracurricular activities because he is knowledgeable about software and hardware. Most of us are not. I have no idea how my smartphone actually works or what data goes where; every time I buy a new one I have to ask one of my grandchildren to show me how it works, because manufacturers keep changing things.
It’s an amazing modern world we live in, yes. But it seems less and less private by the day.
Editor’s Note: Schumer’s closure is here. Rather than putting the American people first, Chuck Schumer and radical Democrats forced a government shutdown on health care for illegal immigrants. They own that.
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