The smart vacuum cleaner was remotely bricked for not collecting data.

An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

  • Zier@fedia.io
    4·
    1 hour ago

    There needs to be a huge neon orange warning on the Front of these products that explains, clearly, that you don’t own it, your privacy will be invaded and the company can disable it at anytime. This will stop people from buying this garbage, and hopefully companies will stop if they want our money.

    My life rule is, if it says Smart on it, it’s never going to be smart. It will always cause trouble.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      43 minutes ago

      IMO “Smart” refers to the lawyers that got paid to write a 900-page TOS that lets a company do whatever they want.