The world today has become one that is inundated with all kinds of “smart” devices designed to try to make your life easier. You are able to control aspects of your entire home from afar today, from turning on and off your house alarm, switching lights on, turning up the heat or air conditioning and even starting the dishwasher, washing machine or your bath before you walk through the door. Your coffee maker knows how you like your coffee, your mattress remembers the firmness you like and your car can park itself and stop itself if you need it to. All of these modern conveniences are great and there are even more to come, but is all of this coming at a price to you? Are your smart gadgets spying on you and invading your privacy?
What these Gadgets are Doing
As much as you love having these conveniences around you there is some natural concern about just what these gadgets are doing. In order for all of these things to work they are making use of the Internet to send data back and forth. During this process, the data you are sending is going back to the company that created the device, runs the application or both. While this transmission is supposed to one of anonymity, the odds are pretty good that the company could pick out an individual if it wanted and many companies are working on ways that they can use this information to do more direct marketing and target marketing to specific individuals based on common practices and behavior.
Check Your Privacy Policies
If you have one or several devices that do different things like this for you then you know that there are privacy policies associated with all of these gadgets as well. While most people may never actually read the policies they get, if you look at them you will notice that most are very non-specific and non-committal about the information collected, how it is used and what the company can do. For example, all of this voice command technology used today makes use of your voice commands to forward information on for processing, but what exactly that processing is can be unclear. Devices that allow for remote access not only leave you open to be watched by companies but by hackers as well since they can gain access to these transmittals over the airwaves much like cellphone calls can be intercepted.
While there are a lot of worst-case scenarios out there that you can come up with to see how smart gadgets could be used to invade your privacy or steal information, the important part to realize about all of this is that security needs to be better regarding the use of these devices both on the part of the manufacturer and the part of the consumer in order for them to really work safely and properly to everyone’s benefit. There is still learning going on and hopefully this will develop more in the future to make the devices even better to use.